Lamia Chaari Fourati

WBAN data scheduling and aggregation under WBAN/WLAN healthcare network

Nowadays, wireless body area networks (WBANs) become an emerging technology which has grown considerably. An increase in the deployment of devices on patients promotes researchers and application developers to focus on issues related to WBAN networks. Therefore, several studies have been done in this field by researchers. The IEEE 802.15.6 standard was proposed to satisfy all the requirements for WBANs communication. As sensed data in such type of networks, it should be transmitted in a reliable and QoS based way. A public-BAN is defined as a network of several personal-BANs. The centralized public-BAN consists of a static coordinator and several personal-BANs. The static coordinator is able to command a portable coordinator in order to control a personal-BAN and runs as an Internet Gateway. In this paper, we considered bridging communications between the IEEE 802.15.6-based WBANs and the IEEE 802.11e-based centralized public-BAN (WLAN). Especially, we proposed two new scheduling algorithms to satisfy QoS requirements in WBAN networks and to overcome the starvation mode of the packets without the highest priority. In order to perform this aim, we introduced the critical delay (CD) as a parameter to serve packets taking into account their priorities and classify them into an aggregated frame. The performance of our proposed schedulers is compared with Priority Queue scheduler (PQ) and Priority Queue Aggregation scheduler (PQA). Conducted simulations illustrate that our proposed schedulers performance overcomes the other schedulers in term of latency, throughput and dropped packets for emergency, general monitoring and controlled load traffics.

Investigation and performance analysis of MAC protocols for WBAN networks

Recently, interest in the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for patient monitoring has grown significantly. Therefore, very interesting researches are concentrating on enhancing patient monitoring systems that require quality of services provisioning at different levels and especially in communication between WBAN nodes. Therefore, the conception of an efficient MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol is required to satisfy the stringent monitoring system requirements. In this context, investigations related to the most efficient and recent WBAN MAC protocols are carried out taking in consideration the requirements of WBAN MAC protocols, and the MAC proposals classification is presented in this paper. Furthermore, to illustrate the performance of the recently drafted IEEE 802.15.6 standard, IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee MAC) and TMAC protocols in different working conditions, we have elaborated different scenarios to simulate these protocols using CASTALIA framework and OMNET++ network simulator. Besides that, we have also computed the end-to-end delay (E2E) in the worst case for those protocols.

Performance Analysis of Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

In recent years, very interesting researches are concentrated to develop patient monitoring systems for revolutionizing health monitoring. A wireless body area network (WBAN) needs a MAC protocol, which obey to the BAN requirements and specifications. The design of a medium access control is a challenge due to the characteristics of wireless channel and the need for minimization of consumption. For medical applications, WBAN should collect and transmit information of patient in a reliable manner and in a timely manner to monitoring entity. In this paper, we present the specifications and characteristics of medium access protocols for WBAN. A showing of the most efficient MAC protocols and some simulations results are presented to further illustrate the performance of the three MAC protocols namely IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee MAC), TMAC and IEEE 802.15.6 (Baseline MAC).

Routing protocols performance analysis for scalable video coding (SVC) transmission over mobile ad-hoc networks

The main challenge of future wireless networks is providing quality of service and quality of experience to satisfy the consumer. This can be achieved by providing mechanisms that will serve optimally the users with the required system resources according to the QoS. Satisfying video consumer require enhancing video streaming quality. Therefore, video streaming over wireless network and particularly over MANET necessitate deeper investigations. In this context, this paper focused on performance analysis of routing protocol over MANET for scalable video streaming. In this work the video codec under evaluation is H.264/SVC and the routing protocols are DSR, AODV, DSDV and AOMD. Our evaluation carried using the Ns-2 simulators configured to support an ad-hoc environment. The QoS metrics used in this analysis are Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Average End-to-end Delay and packets loss rate.

PFKA: A physiological feature based key agreement for wireless body area network

In recent years, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has emerged as a new technology which allows human body monitoring. Because of their enormous benefits, the use of this type of wireless networks is surprisingly increasing day by day and it has a strong presence in several domains. However, WBAN has many challenges yet to be resolved. Security is the most crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a novel key agreement scheme termed Physiological-Feature-based Key Agreement (PFKA) as a biometric based security system. The proposed scheme allows sensors belonging the same WBAN to agree on a symmetric cryptographic key generated from overlapping physiological signal features. On one hand, security analysis shows that our protocol can guarantee data confidentiality, authenticity and integrity. In the other hand, performance analysis show that our scheme reduces communication overhead in comparison with the other proposal protocol termed Secure and Efficient Ordered-Physiological-Feature-based Key Agreement for Wireless Body Area Networks (OPFKA).

Implementing shortest path routing mechanism using Openflow POX controller

Network management is a challenging problem of wide impact with many enterprises suffering significant financial losses. The Software Defined Networks (SDN) approach is a new paradigm that enables the management of networks with low cost and complexity. The goal of SDN is to make sure that all control-level logical decisions are taken at a central way, as compared to traditional networking, wherein control-level decisions are taken locally and intelligence is distributed in each switch. The aim of this paper is to present a routing solution based on SDN architecture implemented in OpenFlow environment and providing the shortest path routing. The simulations have been carried out in an emulation environment based on Linux and POX controller.

New priority MAC protocol for wireless body area networks

The rapid advancements in wireless communication technologies and micro-electronics systems have fostered the development of small and intelligent micro-components that incorporate sensing devices and wireless communications into a single miniature circuit that are wearable or implementable inside the human body for the purpose of medical and healthcare applications. These components when deployed are mainly known as WBANs for Wireless Body Area Networks. One of the main issues in such networks is the medium access techniques mainly for those data which could be urgent. The design of a medium access control protocol for a WBAN is a challenge due to the characteristics of wireless channel, the diversity of traffic, access latency and the need for minimization of energy consumption. Based on the integrated super frame structure of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6, an hybrid medium access control protocol named Priority MAC (PMAC) is proposed in this paper. In PMAC protocol, data channels are separated from control channels and the priority is given to the life critical traffic (emergency traffic). Furthermore, a sleep mode is used in order to save energy of the wearable wireless sensors and hence increase their lifetime.

An OpenFlow Architecture for Managing Content-Centric-Network (OFAM-CCN) based on popularity caching strategy

Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) and Content-Centric-Networking (CCN) are gathering an important consideration from academic world and manufacturing. They are perceived as a big opportunity for future Internet. In order to innovate and optimize network resources, the integration of CCN functionalities with OpenFlow architecture presents an attractive deal. However, there are deployment issues requiring a gradual approach to achieve these goals. The current specifications implementing CCN over OpenFlow have not been inspected sufficiently, although the conceptual design was investigated. This paper introduces OFAM-CCN, a new OpenFlow Architecture for Managing CCN to improve this process through new modifications based on Popularity Caching Strategy taking into account caching as a fundamental principle of CCN. SDN facilitates the deployment of the CCN features.OFAM-CCN is a new OpenFlow Architecture for Managing CCN.OFAM-CCN is based on Popularity Caching Strategy.OpenFlow controller provide the management of the whole CCN network.A centralized cache management improves efficiently the hit rate.OFAM-CCN provides cache resources optimization.

Priority consideration in inter-WBAN data scheduling and aggregation for monitoring systems

Wireless body area networks WBANs are composed of small intelligent tiny wireless sensors; these sensors are responsible for collecting information of a patients vital signs and transmitting vital information. WBAN offers mobility to patients and flexibility to medical staff. An increase of the deployment of monitoring systems on patients promotes researchers and developers to focus on issues related to WBAN. Quality of service QoS has been always treated as a major issue in WBAN technology, and scheduling as a packet prioritizing mechanism contributes to QoS guarantee provisioning significantly. In this paper, two novel inter-WBAN data scheduling and aggregation are developed for monitoring systems in order to satisfy QoS requirements in WBAN networks. We introduced a novel parameter called critical delay to serve packets taking into account their priorities and classify them into an aggregated frame to be further transmitted to medical server. The proposed scheme provides QoS-guaranteed service for the applications running on the sensor nodes in all the three aspects of QoS, that is, delay, throughput and packet loss. Copyright

QoS Improvement for Video Streaming over MANET Using Network-Coding

Video streaming (like YouTube) services and related applications become more and more widespread. Therefore, video streaming delivery over a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) becomes a necessity as an important content delivery infrastructure between the user (content consumer) and the content storage node. Furthermore, user mobility impacts the quality of the delivered video and hence new concepts should be considered. Accordingly, the innovative concept on network coding (NC) emerges as a promising approach for improving the video transmission quality mainly in multicast environment. In this paper, we focus on Quality of Service (QoS) improvement for video streaming over MANET using random network coding. Basically, we consider video coded by H264/SVC codec that generates packets with different priorities and uses the IEEE 802.11e MAC for traffic differentiation. A successful transmission of high priority packets leads to enhance the video transmission quality. Accordingly, we propose a transmission scheme to protect high priority packets from being lost. Our approach, named Multicast Scalable Video Transmission using Classification-Scheduling Algorithms and Network Coding over MANET (and denoted MSVT_CSA_NC), adopts a cross layer solution between the H.264/SVC codec, the network and MAC layers. Moreover, our delivery mechanisms based on random network coding ensure high throughput and low network load over MANET. Simulation results confirm the substantial performance improvement brought by our approach.