Mohamed Aymen Chalouf

eHealth: Survey on research projects, comparative study of telemonitoring architectures and main issues

Abstract Today, the number of elderly people and patients with reduced autonomy or with chronic diseases are steadily increasing. In addition, a stay in hospital or nursing home is very expensive. Thus, in recent years we have witnessed the development of projects to keep these people at home while providing them the needed care and assistance. The number of research projects that have emerged around the world during these last years is very important. Thus we are interested in studying a number of these projects. In this study, we focus on European projects because there is a great similarity with other projects (American, Asian and African projects). After a detailed study of various European research projects conducted in the telemonitoring of patients field, we identify the main requirements of a telemonitoring system. Then, we introduce the common components of these systems. After that, we provide a comparative study in terms of offered services, technical issues, supported functionalities and tools involved in the implementation of the proposed systems. Finally, we introduce some interesting perspectives for the patient telemonitoring research field.

Introduction of Security in the Service Level Negotiated with SLNP Protocol

Today, the evolution of IP networks and the diversity of the data flowing through these networks require domain managers to ensure quality of service (QoS), security and mobility for various communications. Security and QoS can be negotiated between domain managers implied in a service offer. The SLNP (Service Level Negotiation Protocol) protocol allows the negotiation of a service level QoS and it functions in the interoperable environment of web services. The objective of this paper is to consider QoS requirements of the communications when security is introduced in the service level negotiated with the SLNP protocol.

Mitigating the hospital area communication's interference using Cognitive Radio Networks

The communication infrastructures and devices in hospitals are becoming increasingly wireless because of doctors and nurses are mobile in their work. On the other hand, the hospital patients communications or their monitoring devices generate lot of electromagnetic waves. In this context, deployment of wireless networks should not only meet some performance requirements but should also be aware and able to control interferences. Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) seem to be suitable for delivering high-quality communication services and mitigating radio interferences in hospital environment. In this paper, we discuss the design of hospital networks above CRNs to overcome current constraints.

Spectrum Sensing Improvement in Cognitive Radio Networks for Real-Time Patients Monitoring

Regular monitoring of vital signs guarantees a preventive treatment of common diseases ensuring better health for people. Most of the proposed solutions in e-health context are based on a set of hetero- geneous wireless sensors, tting the patient and his environment. Often, these sensors are connected to a local smart node acting as a gateway to the outside (contacts, servers). When the patient is mobile, one of the issues we may face is the guarantee of a permanent connectivity between local smart node and the outside. To overcome this problem, we need to de ne a robust communications architecture able to bene t from di erent technologies and standards. This provides equipments with the ability to dispose of free-bands to perform their transmission any- time and anywhere. Cognitive radio, although appropriate technology, requires taking into account the interdependence between the patients mobility and frequency band changes. Our proposal, is an anticipation model, a decision-making function that predicts the state of frequency bands occupancy. The model combines the machine learning techniques to the Grey Model system to provide low cost algorithm for spectral prediction which facilitates or guarantees permanent connectivity.

Service level negotiation in ubiquitous environments

The goal of the ubiquitous connectivity is to enable mobile users to be permanently and transparently connected to the Internet, with the desired quality of service. In such an environment, it becomes very difficult for service providers to satisfy the needs of users. A solution is to assign a profile to each user in order to optimize and automate the dynamic service level negotiation. These mobile users are often connected to wireless networks and consuming services that require quality of service guarantees such as video on demand or voice over IP. Hence, in ubiquitous environments, we need to guarantee both quality of service and security for mobile users communications. In this paper, we present a protocol for service level negotiation which uses Web Services and includes both quality of service and security in its negotiation. Then, we propose to adapt this protocol, called SLNP, to ubiquitous environments by basing its processing on the user profile and by specifying a collaboration with the IEEE 802.21 standard, which manages the mobility of users and participates in the creation of profiles. Details of the implantation and experimental tests are also shown in this paper.

PHY/MAC signalling protocols for resilient cognitive radio networks

Our society relies more and more on wireless communication technologies while most of the RF spectrum has already been allocated by the states. As a result, un-licensed bands are becoming crowded which makes it difficult to create a reliable network without using more spectrum than really necessary. Allowing radio nodes to seamlessly switch between different frequency bands without prior synchronisation would allow the creation of a truly resilient radio network capable of avoiding the frequency bands used by nodes that are not part of the network. In this paper, we propose using software-defined radios in order to sense the surrounding RF environment to find the most suitable bands for communication. We also propose a PHY-layer and a MAC-layer signalling protocols to provide a seamless way of discovering other nodes and selecting the parameters that will be used for communicating with them. Our first experimentation results are very promising towards defining a resilient cognitive radio network.

A secured, automated, and dynamic end-to-end service level negotiation

Today, the emerging new services like voice over IP and video on demand require some guarantees in terms of QoS. These services can be accessed using wireless technologies, such as Wi‐Fi or WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access). This may make the service delivery vulnerable to security attacks because of the open medium on which wireless technologies are based. Thus, in addition to QoS level, security level must also be guaranteed for the provided services. In this paper, we present the service level negotiation protocol, which ensures a dynamic negotiation of a service level covering both QoS and security. Moreover, the negotiation flow itself could be the target of some malicious attacks. Indeed, these attacks can aim to degrade the service level (QoS and / or security) or to make an entity, which is involved in a negotiation, unavailable, etc. Thus, the objective of this paper is to study the security of the flow corresponding to the negotiation provided by service level negotiation protocol. In fact, the security required by this flow will be provided through the use of three different mechanisms: Web services security, secure sockets layer, and IP security protocol. Because these security mechanisms may have an impact on the negotiation protocol performances, we will also evaluate this impact to adopt the security solution that allows minimizing it. Copyright

An end-to-end QoS and security joint management for IPTV service delivery

Today, the IPTV technology is emerging as a new concept for delivering and accessing audiovisual services over IP networks. To allow the transmission of IPTV services on wired and wireless networks, different issues should be overcome regarding scalability, quality of service (QoS) provisioning, security guaranty and terminals heterogeneity. In the IPTV architecture, QoS and security constitute two needs that have to be tightly managed. In this paper, we propose a complete end-to-end architecture for providing IPTV services. This architecture enables managing end-to-end QoS and security, while addressing other issues like the terminal heterogeneity. At first, we describe the architecture which is composed of two segments: the core network and the access network. Then, we detail the different mechanisms which allow managing simultaneously QoS and security for the IPTV streams delivered to heterogeneous mobile terminals. Performances evaluation demonstrates the importance of the joint management of security and QoS.

On tightly managing end-to-end QoS and security for IPTV service delivery

Today, the IPTV technology is emerging as a new concept for delivering and accessing audiovisual services over IP networks. To allow the transmission of IPTV services on wired and wireless networks, different issues should be overcome: scalability, QoS provisioning, security guaranty, and terminals heterogeneity. In this regards, there is a relation between QoS and security as both need to be carefully and tightly managed in a complete framework and not tackled separately. In this paper, we show how QoS and security are tightly managed in a complete end-to-end architecture for providing IPTV services while addressing the majority of the above issues (scalability, QoS, security, and heterogeneity). In particular, we propose an IPTV architecture that deals with end-to-end QoS and security management at two segments: the core network and the access network. The core network is composed of independent domains where each of them is managed by a local domain manager having service level negotiation capabilities. The access network is considered as WLAN (802.11) which connects heterogeneous mobile terminals. The proposed IPTV architecture includes two main entities: the Content Server which provides the TV stream in the core network and the Adaptation Gateway that assures the TV stream adaptation in wireless network according to terminal capabilities and user profile.

A QoS-control framework for medical multimedia data transmission in CRN environment

Transmissions of multimedia data in emergency context such as, the occurrence of trauma or stroke are sensitive to the network delay, throughput and packet loss. Depending on the urgency, the communication channel quality can decide the survival of a patient. For saving lives, network infrastructure offering good Quality of Service (QoS), high broadband and low communication cost must be considered. In this context, Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN) seem appropriate. Indeed, this technology is well suited with its sensing ability and the scanning of a wide range of technologies, for assigning adequate frequency bands which meet the application constraints. In this paper, we propose a CRN-framework and an associated analytical tool that sets and imposes constraints to be respected, for ensuring reliable and high quality end-to-end communications.