Fasee Ullah

Traffic Adaptive MAC Protocols in Wireless Body Area Networks

In Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), every healthcare application that is based on physical sensors is responsible for monitoring the vital signs data of patient. WBANs applications consist of heterogeneous and dynamic traffic loads. Routine patient’s observation is described as low-load traffic while an alarming situation that is unpredictable by nature is referred to as high-load traffic. This paper offers a thematic review of traffic adaptive Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in WBANs. First, we have categorized them based on their goals, methods, and metrics of evaluation. The Zigbee standard IEEE 802.15.4 and the baseline MAC IEEE 802.15.6 are also reviewed in terms of traffic adaptive approaches. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of the protocols is made and their performances are analyzed in terms of delay, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and energy consumption. The literature shows that no review work has been done on traffic adaptive MAC protocols in WBANs. This review work, therefore, could add enhancement to traffic adaptive MAC protocols and will stimulate a better way of solving the traffic adaptivity problem.

Traffic Priority-Aware Adaptive Slot Allocation for Medium Access Control Protocol in Wireless Body Area Network

Biomedical sensors (BMSs) monitor the heterogeneous vital signs of patients. They have diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements including reduced collision, delay, loss, and energy consumption in the transmission of data, which are non-constrained, delay-constrained, reliabilityconstrained, and critical. In this context, this paper proposes a traffic priority-aware adaptive slot allocation-based medium access control (TraySL-MAC) protocol. Firstly, a reduced contention adaptive slot allocation algorithm is presented to minimize contention rounds. Secondly, a low threshold vital signs criticality-based adaptive slot allocation algorithm is developed for high priority data. Thirdly, a high threshold vital signs criticality-based adaptive slot allocation algorithm is designed for low priority data. Simulations are performed to comparatively evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol with state-of-the-art MAC protocols. From the analysis of the results, it is evident that the proposed protocol is beneficial in terms of lower packet delivery delay and energy consumption, and higher throughput in realistic biomedical environments.

TraPy-MAC: Traffic Priority Aware Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

Recently, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has witnessed significant attentions in research and product development due to the growing number of sensor-based applications in healthcare domain. Design of efficient and effective Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is one of the fundamental research themes in WBAN. Static on-demand slot allocation to patient data is the main approach adopted in the design of MAC protocol in literature, without considering the type of patient data specifically the level of severity on patient data. This leads to the degradation of the performance of MAC protocols considering effectiveness and traffic adjustability in realistic medical environments. In this context, this paper proposes a Traffic Priority-Aware MAC (TraPy-MAC) protocol for WBAN. It classifies patient data into emergency and non-emergency categories based on the severity of patient data. The threshold value aided classification considers a number of parameters including type of sensor, body placement location, and data transmission time for allocating dedicated slots patient data. Emergency data are not required to carry out contention and slots are allocated by giving the due importance to threshold value of vital sign data. The contention for slots is made efficient in case of non-emergency data considering threshold value in slot allocation. Moreover, the slot allocation to emergency and non-emergency data are performed parallel resulting in performance gain in channel assignment. Two algorithms namely, Detection of Severity on Vital Sign data (DSVS), and ETS Slots allocation based on the Severity on Vital Sign (ETS-SVS) are developed for calculating threshold value and resolving the conflicts of channel assignment, respectively. Simulations are performed in ns2 and results are compared with the state-of-the-art MAC techniques. Analysis of results attests the benefit of TraPy-MAC in comparison with the state-of-the-art MAC in channel assignment in realistic medical environments.

Patient data prioritization in the cross-layer designs of wireless body area network

In Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), various biomedical sensors (BMSs) are deployed to monitor various vital signs of a patient for detecting the abnormality of the vital signs. These BMSs inform the medical staff in advance before the patients life goes into a threatening situation. In WBAN, routing layer has the same challenges as generally seen in WSN, but the unique requirements of WBANs need to be addressed by the novel routing mechanisms quite differently from the routing mechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The slots allocation to emergency and nonemergency patients data is one of the challenging issues in IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 MAC Superframe structures. In the similar way, IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 PHY layers have also unique constraints to modulate the various vital signs of patient data into continuous and discrete forms. Numerous research contributions have been made for addressing these issues of the aforementioned three layers in WBAN. Therefore, this paper presents a cross-layer design structure of WBAN with various issues and challenges. Moreover, it also presents a detail review of the existing cross-layer protocols in the WBAN domain by discussing their strengths and weaknesses.

Medium Access Control (MAC) for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): Superframe structure, multiple access technique, taxonomy, and challenges

Health monitoring using biomedical sensors has witnessed significant attention in recent past due to the evolution of a new research area in sensor network known as Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In WBANs, a number of implantable, wearable, and off-body biomedical sensors are utilized to monitor various vital signs of patient’s body for early detection, and medication of grave diseases. In literature, a number of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for WBANs have been suggested for addressing the unique challenges related to reliability, delay, collision and energy in the new research area. The design of MAC protocols is based on multiple access techniques. Understanding the basis of MAC protocol designs for identifying their design objectives in broader perspective, is a quite challenging task. In this context, this paper qualitatively reviews MAC protocols for WBANs. Firstly, 802.15.4 and 802.15.6 based MAC Superframe structures are investigated focusing on design objectives. Secondly, different multiple access techniques such as TDMA, CSMA/CA, Slotted Aloha and Hybrid are explored in terms of design goals. Thirdly, a two-layered taxonomy is presented for MAC protocols. First layer classification is based on multiple access techniques, whereas second layer classification is based on design objectives and characteristics of MAC protocols. Critical and qualitative analysis is carried out for each considered MAC protocol. Comparative study of different MAC protocols is also performed. Finally, some open research challenges in the area are identified with initial research directions.

Multi-Path video streaming in vehicular communication: Approaches and challenges

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) has witnessed significant attention from academia and industries, due to the growing number of applications and devices focusing on safety and efficiency in transportation. Video Streaming in Vehicular Communication (VSVC) presents interactive real-time view of an emergency incidence on roads. On-board unit of vehicles are utilized for streaming real time video of on road traffic, and disseminate among vehicles via Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication. VSVC is a challenging task due to the delay constrained nature of video data and dynamic vehicular network environment. Some of the fundamental issues in video streaming include queueing delay, bandwidth underutilization, and intermittent connectivity. Various techniques have been suggested in literature to address the issues in video streaming. To this end, this paper presents a qualitative review on multipath video streaming focusing on vehicular communication. Specifically, review of different multipath approaches with their comparative assessment are presented. Major challenges in multipath video streaming are identified as future directions of research. The review would benefit researchers and practitioners, in terms of enhancing clarity in multipath video streaming literature and emphasizing the issues.

Patient Data Dissemination in Wireless Body Area Network: A Qualitative Analysis

With the availability of various sensors for vital signs monitoring of a human body, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have envisioned several applications in the health-care domain. Different wearable and implanted sensor nodes report the vital signs information to a remote medical facility via the local body coordinator. Together the set of sensor nodes and body coordinator form a network known as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). In addition to the common routing constraints of WSNs, WBAN poses unique challenges constrained by heterogeneous nature of data, postural movements, and temperature-rise issues. Numerous contributions have been made to address the aforementioned issues of WBAN and are classified as temperature-aware routing protocols, cluster-based routing protocols, QoS-aware routing protocols and postural movement based routing protocols. This paper qualitatively analyzes the performance of the variously proposed protocols in terms of energy efficiency, provision of QoS, mobility, end-to-end delay, and temperature-rise. A relative performance of all the protocols is also given in order to develop a general understanding of the overall efficacy in-line with the unique constraints of WBANs.

Emergency data handling medium access control protocol for wireless body area network

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) assists in monitoring of the health conditions of a patient. The monitored data of a patient require diverse QoS and need to be delivered to the coordinator without delay and packet loss. In this context, this paper proposes a MAC Superframe structure which allocates channels based on the severities of the detected data of a patient and transmit immediately without delay and loss. The simulation results show that the proposed MAC performs better by reducing delay and improving throughput.

A dynamic Energy-aware fault tolerant routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

In recent decades, cluster-based schemes have emerged as viable solutions for energy conservation problem in wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, most of the existing solutions incur imbalanced energy consumption and high network overheads. In addition, existing cluster-based solutions do not optimize route discovery based on the restricted resources of sensor nodes. Moreover, most of the cluster-based solutions perform periodical re-clustering for load balancing, which results in shortening network lifetime. This research paper presents a Dynamic Energy-aware Fault Tolerant Routing (DEFTR) protocol that exploits uniform-sized network partitioning based on network size and utilizes a multi-facet routing mechanism, which takes into consideration the residual energy, and position and link quality of neighbors. Furthermore, DEFTR not only offers reliable and energy efficient data routing but also supports fault tolerance. Simulation results demonstrate that DEFTR improved the network lifetime by 20.9% and throughput by 35%, also it reduced the delay by 29% and transmission cost by 46% in comparison to the existing work.