Wireless Body Area Network Architecture Research Articles

Internet of Things in healthcare: A survey on protocol standards, enabling technologies, WBAN architectures and open issues

This paper provides a state-of-art review on healthcare-IoT infrastructure, prominently focusing on protocol standards, enabling technologies, wireless body area network (WBAN) architectures and implementation issues. Internet of Things enchains the seamless healthcare devices from an actuate-sense-communicate (ASC) network in a proliferative channel in order to develop an operationally connected healthcare environment (OCHE). Sensors and actuators are the essential components of any IoT system that generates enormous data, and this data is communicated across the network concerning elementary statuses and stored in a distributed cloud platform. This paper begins by providing a brief horizontal overview of the IoT system. The enhanced technical details pertaining to healthcare scenarios such as WBAN architecture, layered healthcare IoT architecture, and enabling technologies are described in the forthcoming fragments of the paper. Authors have then provided a brief summary of the most anticipated protocol stacks and design issues that allows researchers and healthcare professionals to understand swiftly how the numerous protocols put together to attain desired functionalities without having to get through standards and RFCs. Authors have also explored recent state-of-art to identify some of the key challenges of the healthcare IoT domain and a short summary of each related research is presented. Moreover, the relation between Healthcare IoT and other disruptive technologies such as Blockchain and Big Data is being described. Finally, the authors explicated the detailed use-case scenarios to demonstrate how the numerous protocols and architectures presented in the paper could put together to attain desired healthcare services.

Retracted: Designing a Healthcare-Enabled Software-Defined Wireless Body Area Network Architecture for Secure Medical Data and Efficient Diagnosis.

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1155/2022/9210761.].

Routing Protocols in Wireless Body Area Networks: Architecture, Challenges, and Classification

The wireless body area network (WBAN) is a branch of the wireless sensor network (WSN) intended for tracking essential patients’ physiological signals and transferring this knowledge to the coordinator. During the routing of data, WBANs encounter critical routing problems like WSNs. Moreover, the particular constraints of WBANs make it more challenging that they need to be addressed. This survey article categorizes and briefly analyzes a range of current routing methods utilized in WBANs. The routing protocol is essential to the creation of any efficient and reliable wireless body area network due to a limited size of battery in the body sensor nodes. A comparison study of numerous routing protocols has been made in this paper, which is helpful in selecting the optimal routing protocol for the application being targeted. The article describes the WBAN architecture and addresses numerous challenges in the context of successful WBAN routing. In this paper, several existing WBAN routing methods are presented which are influenced by network structure, energy, quality of service (QoS), node temperature, human position, node transmission range, and other factors. The protocols, including cross-layered, cluster-based, QoS-aware, postural movement-based, temperature-aware, postural movement-based, and routing protocols, are given in an expressive taxonomy. Different routing protocols that have already been developed for WBANs are compared with more advanced protocols. The pros and cons of each protocol are looked at based on factors like delay, packet delivery ratio, and energy use. The researchers can utilize this survey paper as a reference for studying various routing protocols particularly in the medical and healthcare systems.

A Review on Critical Data Transmission in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) assemble multiple transceiver nodes in, on, or around a patient's body to transmit physiological signals to the sink node and further send it to the medical personnel via a medical server. WBANs a sensor network that is characterized as energy-dependent. Due to this finite nature, the deployment of intelligent utilization is needed. Quality of service (QoS) is another area that needs rapt attention to receive exactly what was sent from the source node to the destination node and throughput. Critical data transmission is characterized by abnormal data status that requires an urgent response from the medical personnel without delay to save the patient's life. In this review article, we propose a review of critical data transmission in wireless body area networks. However, most past articles in this line focus more on energy-efficient, security and privacy, quality of the links, throughput, network maximization, and so on. None of them looks into the direction of transmitting critical data directly to the sink node without multi-hopping of the physiological signals between intermediate nodes, which wastes the time of transmission to save patient life. This disparity between these scholars motivates us to fill the gap between them. This review article briefly discussed the state-of-the-art critical data transmission in WBANs alongside the WBANs architecture and implementation. Furthermore, a pragmatic approach to determining the threshold's degree of critical data index sensed during transmission was also considered.

A Survey on Wireless Wearable Body Area Networks: A Perspective of Technology and Economy.

The deployment of wearable or body-worn devices is increasing rapidly, and thus researchers’ interests mainly include technical and economical issues, such as networking, interoperability, security, power optimization, business growth and regulation. To address these issues properly, previous survey papers usually focused on describing the wireless body area network architecture and network protocols. This implies that deployment issues and awareness issues of wearable and BAN devices are not emphasized in previous work. To defeat this problem, in this study, we have focused on feasibility, limitations, and security concerns in wireless body area networks. In the aspect of the economy, we have focused on the compound annual growth rate of these devices in the global market, different regulations of wearable/wireless body area network devices in different regions and countries of the world and feasible research projects for wireless body area networks. In addition, this study focuses on the domain of devices that are equally important to physicians, sportsmen, trainers and coaches, computer scientists, engineers, and investors. The outcomes of this study relating to physicians, fitness trainers and coaches indicate that the use of these devices means they would be able to treat their clients in a more effective way. The study also converges the focus of businessmen on the Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and provides manufacturers and vendors with information about different regulatory bodies that are monitoring and regulating WBAN devices. Therefore, by providing deployment issues in the aspects of technology and economy at the same time, we believe that this survey can serve as a preliminary material that will lead to more advancements and improvements in deployment in the area of wearable wireless body area networks. Finally, we present open issues and further research direction in the area of wireless body area networks.

Designing a Healthcare-Enabled Software-Defined Wireless Body Area Network Architecture for Secure Medical Data and Efficient Diagnosis

In the struggle against population aging, chronic diseases, and a lack of medical facilities, the emergence of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) technology has ushered in optimism. WBANs use a variety of wearable and implanted biosensor nodes to constantly monitor physiological parameters such as oxygen saturation (SpO2), electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyography (EMG), electroencephalogram (EEG), blood pressure, respiration rate, body temperature, and pulse rate. Importantly, these vital signs are communicated to a doctor over a public network, who can diagnose ailments remotely and efficiently. Among these communications, the security and privacy of patients are the prime concerns while transferring data over an open wireless channel from biosensor nodes to a Medical Server (MS) through a Base Station (BS) for efficient medical diagnosis. Finding an effective security strategy for patients which rely on WBANs to monitor their health information is a huge challenge due to the confined nature of the WBANs environment. To tackle the above challenges, in this research, a new, efficient, and secure healthcare-enabled software-defined WBANs architecture based on Schnorr signcryption and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC) is suggested in which the SDN technology is integrated into WBANs. By separating the control and data planes in an efferent manner, SDN technology allows you to control and manage the network in a programmable manner. The main features of SDN, such as its programmability, flexibility, and centralized control, make it a simple and scalable network. In this research, first, a Software-Defined Wireless Body Area Networks (SD-WBANs) architecture has been designed, and then a lightweight Schnorr signcryption with Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC) has been proposed to preserve sensitive patient data security during transmission on public networks. Moreover, a well-known Multicriteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approach known as Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) is also used to demonstrate the success of the suggested system. According to the performance analysis, the suggested approach beats previous state-of-the-art techniques in terms of computation cost, communication overhead, storage cost, and energy usage.

A survey on energy efficiency intrabody communication techniques for wearable devices

Currently, wireless body area networks (WBANs) are developing rapidly. Miniature wearable devices which are light weight and low power consumption can be developed using modern technology. However, the WBANs research challenge is power consumption. This paper provides the two intrabody communication (IBC) methods review. The equivalent body channel models and modeling methods are analyzed. The conventional IBC WBANs architecture is reviewed and novel energy-efficient architecture and an IBC WBANs data transmission technique are proposed. The experiment was conducted in order to measure the BodyCom mobile module output power. The comparative analysis showed that the power consumption of the IBC proposed technique is 7 times lower than Bluetooth LE, and 14 times lower than ZigBee. The proposed technique can be applied in areas such as home and industrial automation, medical appliances, wearable devices, security, and internet of things.

Channel aware wireless body area network with cognitive radio technology in disaster cases

SummaryToday, developments in wireless technologies and the increase in disaster cases reveal the necessity of various wireless technologies cooperation. Several technologies are able to cooperate with each other for eHealth, IoT, and so forth applications in disaster cases with the pros and cons of today's communications. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) and cognitive radio (CR) are promising technologies that can be used together to troubleshoot communication problems and make rescue operations successful in disaster situations. WBAN is a radio frequency‐based wireless network technology that aims to monitor the functions and conditions of the human body through the sensor nodes that form a network. CR proposes solutions to current problems of wireless communications such as spectrum scarcity and inefficient use of the spectrum. In this study, CR‐based WBAN architecture is proposed in disaster cases, and so the emergency, time‐critical, and vital signs of WBAN users (endangered people and rescue team members) are able to reach the health unit or disaster management unit in an opportunistic way. CR technology is integrated with a WBAN architecture utilizing the CSMA/C‐based IEEE 802.15.6 standard, and performance analysis is executed with the Riverbed Modeler simulation software. Furthermore, using the channel bonding technique, the throughput, the delay, the packet delivery ratios, and energy consumption ratios of the proposed architecture are investigated. According to the results, it was found that CR‐based WBAN architecture was 25% more successful in energy efficiency and 5% more successful in packet delivery ratio with channel bonding technique than the traditional WBAN.

Energy-efficient and SDN-enabled routing algorithm for wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are one of the special branches of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that attract attention in various disciplines such as health, engineering, biology, and computers. Also, WBANs are an important research area that can contribute to human life and health in many ways. The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) approach is a solution that can make simpler, flexible, manageable, and more efficient the heterogeneous and complex network structures, such as WBANs. In the Software-Defined WBAN (SD-WBAN) architecture, it is of great importance to extend the network lifetime due to the limited energy of the sensor nodes and the routing process is one of the most important energy consumption processes of SD-WBANs. For an effective and efficient routing approach, service quality requirement parameters, for example, throughput, energy efficiency, end-to-end delay, and packet transmission rates need to be considered. In this study, a new energy-efficient and SDN-enabled routing algorithm (ESR-W) has been developed with the use of the Fuzzy-based Dijkstra technique. So, the most appropriate route determination is performed with a central and reactive (on-demand) approach among many SD-WBAN users. SNR, battery level and hop count metrics are used for routing decisions. In order to compare ESR-W with existing protocols AODV and SDNRouting, extensive scenarios and simulations have been performed in the Riverbed Modeler simulation software. According to the results, ESR-W has been observed very successful compared to other protocols in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, packet transmission rate, and energy consumption.

Decentralization of Services Through Three Tiers in Wireless Body Area Networks

The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) contains a set of sensors, placed in the patient’s environment, to detect the vital signs and transmit the results towards the relevant services that interact in urgent cases. The present work exposes a functional WBAN architecture formed by three layers: closest, intermediate and farthest. The closest layer senses the chemical and biological signs. If the case is normal, or it can be locally regulated, the service stops there; else the intermediate service, namely the local hospital, is consulted to make treatments. Therefore, the patient will be transported into the hospital for examinations. If this condition is established the processus stopped there, otherwise, the request of help from an outside hospital becomes necessary. This request passes through a manager that supervises a network of hospitals and looks for a free place to welcome the patient. After the localization of a hospital, its coordinates will be forwarded into the customer hospital, for transporting the patient. The simulation results show that this design increases the patient’s probability of healing and maximizes the use of the available resources, relative to the centralization of services at a single layer or at two layers.

Performance analysis of static wireless body area network for different routing protocols

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a special type of wireless sensor network. It consists of sensors mounted on a human body to measure important body parameters. WBAN network uses different technologies such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6. In this paper, research outcomes focused on WBAN architecture design and performance analysis in a simulation environment for different routing protocols are done for IEEE 802.15.6. A comparative report is prepared for WBAN technology. Routing protocols are compared with each other based on energy consumption, throughput, and delay. For simulation purposes, a sensor network is designed by placing three sensors in a single hop star topology with a single central hub. The test run was successfully carried out to check the network configuration. A performance of three routing protocols for WBAN wireless technologies is investigated. These three routing protocols include AODV (Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector routing), DSDV (Destination Sequenced –Distance Vector routing) and DSR (Dynamic Source Routing). In three sets of simulation, the effect of various routing protocols on throughput, delay, and the energy consumption is calculated by increasing packet rate up to 2000 Kbps with an increment of 250 Kbps. Simulation results have shown that WBAN with AODV routing protocol is the most suitable to reduce power consumption and delay, and to increase throughput. Detailed analysis is discussed in the paper. Â

A Secure Framework for Data Sharing in Private Blockchain-Based WBANs

With the development of sensor devices, wireless sensor networks have been widely used, and Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are relatively common application scenarios in wireless sensor networks. The wearable device is used to collect physiological data of the human body, and the server device is adopted to store physiological data of the human body. The openness of the network environment and network devices' dynamic nature make WBANs vulnerable to security threats from attackers. The centralized two-hop architecture contains only one hub node, and the data stored in the hub node may be tampered with by attackers. Once attackers occupy the node, the entire network will be paralyzed. To tackle such an issue, it is proposed in this article a model in WBANs architecture based on Blockchain technology, where the authentication protocol and blind signature protocol between nodes are designed in the new WBANs model, making the Blockchain data transmission system in a wireless network environment secure and reliable. Experimental results show that the proposed method is promising and shows higher levels of safety and stability than other methods.

A Review on Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a new trend in the technology that provides remote mechanism to monitor and collect patient’s health record data using wearable sensors. It is widely recognized that a high level of system security and privacy play a key role in protecting these data when being used by the healthcare professionals and during storage to ensure that patient’s records are kept safe from intruder’s danger. It is therefore of great interest to discuss security and privacy issues in WBANs. In this paper, we reviewed WBAN communication architecture, security and privacy requirements and security threats and the primary challenges in WBANs to these systems based on the latest standards and publications. This paper also covers the state-of-art security measures and research in WBAN.

A Review on Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a new trend in the technology that provides remote mechanism to monitor and collect patient’s health record data using wearable sensors. It is widely recognized that a high level of system security and privacy play a key role in protecting these data when being used by the healthcare professionals and during storage to ensure that patient’s records are kept safe from intruder’s danger. It is therefore of great interest to discuss security and privacy issues in WBANs. In this paper, we reviewed WBAN communication architecture, security and privacy requirements and security threats and the primary challenges in WBANs to these systems based on the latest standards and publications. This paper also covers the state-of-art security measures and research in WBAN.

SDN‐based wireless body area network routing algorithm for healthcare architecture

The use of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in healthcare applications has made it convenient to monitor both health personnel and patient status continuously in real time through wearable wireless sensor nodes. However, the heterogeneous and complex network structure of WBANs has some disadvantages in terms of control and management. The software‐defined network (SDN) approach is a promising technology that defines a new design and management approach for network communications. In order to create more flexible and dynamic network structures in WBANs, this study uses the SDN approach. For this, a WBAN architecture based on the SDN approach with a new energy‐aware routing algorithm for healthcare architecture is proposed. To develop a more flexible architecture, a controller that manages all HUBs is designed. The proposed architecture is modeled using the Riverbed Modeler software for performance analysis. The simulation results show that the SDN‐based structure meets the service quality requirements and shows superior performance in terms of energy consumption, throughput, successful transmission rate, and delay parameters according to the traditional routing approach.

HUBsFLOW: A novel interface protocol for SDN-enabled WBANs

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) concept is one of the most promising technologies for healthcare applications. In WBANs, sensor nodes are capable of sensing, gathering the human body signs and sending them to the HUB; the communication between nodes and HUB is called as intra-WBAN communications. Inter-WBAN communication manages all HUBs for communications of various WBANs. WBANs have inherently heterogeneous structures and limited energy sources, and also, installation/configuration network management processes are increasingly quite complex. New approaches are required to implement WBANs in order to overcome these challenges. We propose the Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach aims at constructing a flexible and manageable structure for inter-WBAN communications. Therefore, a new SDN-enabled WBAN architecture with HUBsFlow interface protocol is proposed in this paper. The proposed architecture provides a flexible, manageable, and an energy sensitive structure. Hence, a controller that is a key component for SDN undertakes all management and control processes about network. HUBsFlow interface protocol is utilized on the controller that provides the communications among the controller and HUBs in inter-WBAN communications. All components, protocols, and algorithms of the proposed architecture are developed and simulated using Riverbed Modeler software. Throughput, delay, packet loss ratio, bit error rate, and energy consumption parameters are taken into account for performance evaluation of the proposed architecture. The results show that the proposed architecture outperforms when comparing with traditional WBAN architecture and satisfies IEEE/ISO 11073 service quality requirements.

Designing insistence-aware medium access control protocol and energy conscious routing in quality-of-service-guaranteed wireless body area network

Wireless body area network is a type of wireless sensor network that enables efficient healthcare system. To minimize frequent sensor replacement due to resource restrictions, it is necessary to improve energy efficiency in wireless body area network. This article deals with energy efficiency and quality-of-service improvement together in novel wireless body area network architecture. A novel wireless body area network architecture is designed with dual sink nodes in order to minimize delay and energy consumption. A novel insistence-aware medium access control protocol which is aware of criticality of sensed data is presented in the proposed wireless body area network. Prior knowledge-based weighted routing algorithm is responsible to select optimal route for data transmission. In prior knowledge-based weighted routing, weight value is computed by considering significant metrics such as residual energy, link stability, distance, and delay in order to improve energy efficiency and quality of service in the network. Energy consumption is further minimized by incorporating graph-based sleep scheduling algorithm. In graph-based sleep scheduling, criticality of sensor node is also considered as major metric. In coordinator, split and map–based neural network classifier is involved to perform packet classification. After classification, packets are assigned to corresponding sink node according to packet type. Then, throughput and delay metrics are improved by frame aggregation process which is involved in sink node. Extensive simulation in OMNeT++ shows better performance in network lifetime, throughput, residual energy, dropped packets, and delay.

A survey overview: on wireless body area network and its various applications

With the remarkable change of mobile radio communication over the past years in the wireless communication technologies, makes the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) services to be adopted by most of the people around the world. Wireless body area network is such a special purpose sensor network that was made for continues monitoring the health parameters in real time with the different wire-less sensors by implanting internally or externally of a human body. This wireless sensed information from the vital organs of the human body may be in the form of data, voice, video signals are communicated wirelessly through WBAN. This survey article presents an overview on- the WBAN communication architecture, comparison of WBAN and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), WBAN operating protocols- those are intended for short range wireless communication, and its applications in the medical and non- medical field have been out lined.

A Continuous Change Detection Mechanism to Identify Anomalies in ECG Signals for WBAN-Based Healthcare Environments

The developments and applications of wireless body area networks (WBANs) for healthcare and remote monitoring have brought a revolution in the medical research field. Numerous physiological sensors are integrated in a WBAN architecture in order to monitor any significant changes in normal health conditions. This monitored data are then wirelessly transferred to a centralized personal server (PS). However, this transferred information can be captured and altered by an adversary during communication between the physiological sensors and the PS. Another scenario where changes can occur in the physiological data is an emergency situation, when there is a sudden change in the physiological values, e.g., changes occur in electrocardiogram (ECG) values just before the occurrence of a heart attack. This paper presents a centralized approach for the detection of abnormalities, as well as intrusions, such as forgery, insertions, and modifications in the ECG data. A simplified Markov model-based detection mechanism is used to detect changes in the ECG data. The features are extracted from the ECG data to form a feature set, which is then divided into sequences. The probability of each sequence is calculated, and based on this probability, the system decides whether the change has occurred or not. Our experiments and analyses show that the proposed scheme has a high detection rate for 5% as well as 10% abnormalities in the data set. The proposed scheme also has a higher true negative rate with a significantly reduced running time for both 5% and 10% abnormalities. Similarly, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and ROC convex hull have very promising results.

An Energy Effective WBAN Architecture for Athletes Efforts Analysis under a Common Activity

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is one of the most critical real time networks. In order to increase network lifetime, several protocols have been proposed in the Literature. Majority of these protocols are based on either coverage or residual energy of the network. However, none of the protocols is based on node criticality, communication count, coverage and residual energy. In this paper, we have taken into consideration all the above stated parameters to determine the optimal path for transmission of message. In particular, we are implementing this scenario for Athlete Activity Monitoring to identify the athlete with maximum physical stamina. As per best of our knowledge, only intra-BAN routing protocols are proposed till date. However, in this paper we have simulated Athlete Activity Monitoring scenario for intra-WBAN and inter- WBAN architecture. It is clear from the simulation results that our scheme performs much better in terms of energy consumption than earlier routing schemes.