Niamat Ullah

An overview of IEEE 802.15.6 standard

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) has emerged as a key technology to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and to diagnose and treat many life threatening diseases. WBAN operates in close vicinity to, on, or inside a human body and supports a variety of medical and non-medical applications. IEEE 802 has established a Task Group called IEEE 802.15.6 for the standardization of WBAN. The purpose of the group is to establish a communication standard optimized for low-power in-body/on-body nodes to serve a variety of medical and non-medical applications. This paper explains the most important features of the new IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The standard defines a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer supporting several Physical (PHY) layers. We briefly overview the PHY and MAC layers specifications together with the bandwidth efficiency of IEEE 802.15.6 standard. We also discuss the security paradigm of the standard.

A Review of Wireless Body Area Networks for Medical Applications

Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the realization of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBANs promise unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring for a long period of time, and provide real-time updates of the patient’s status to the physician. They are widely used for ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, and military applications. This paper reviews the key aspects of WBANs for numerous applications. We present a WBAN infrastructure that provides solutions to on-demand, emergency, and normal traffic. We further discuss in-body antenna design and low-power MAC protocol for a WBAN. In addition, we briefly outline some of the WBAN applications with examples. Our discussion realizes a need for new power-efficient solu-tions towards in-body and on-body sensor networks.

A power efficient MAC protocol for wireless body area networks

Applications of wearable and implanted wireless sensor devices are hot research area. A specialized field called the body area networks (BAN) has emerged to support this area. Managing and controlling such a network is a challenging task. An efficient media access control (MAC) protocol to handle proper management of media access can considerably improve the performance of such a network. Power consumption and delay are major concerns for MAC protocols in a BAN. Low cost wakeup radio module attached with sensor devices can help reduce power consumption and prolong the network lifetime by reducing idle state power consumption and increasing sleep time of a BAN node. In this article, we propose a new MAC protocol for BAN using out of band (on-demand) wakeup radio through a centralized and coordinated external wakeup mechanism. We have compared our method against some existing MAC protocols. Our method is found to be efficient in terms of power consumption and delay.

A very low power MAC (VLPM) protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) consist of a limited number of battery operated nodes that are used to monitor the vital signs of a patient over long periods of time without restricting the patient’s movements. They are an easy and fast way to diagnose the patient’s status and to consult the doctor. Device as well as network lifetime are among the most important factors in a WBAN. Prolonging the lifetime of the WBAN strongly depends on controlling the energy consumption of sensor nodes. To achieve energy efficiency, low duty cycle MAC protocols are used, but for medical applications, especially in the case of pacemakers where data have time-limited relevance, these protocols increase latency which is highly undesirable and leads to system instability. In this paper, we propose a low power MAC protocol (VLPM) based on existing wakeup radio approaches which reduce energy consumption as well as improving the response time of a node. We categorize the traffic into uplink and downlink traffic. The nodes are equipped with both a low power wake-up transmitter and receiver. The low power wake-up receiver monitors the activity on channel all the time with a very low power and keeps the MCU (Micro Controller Unit) along with main radio in sleep mode. When a node [BN or BNC (BAN Coordinator)] wants to communicate with another node, it uses the low-power radio to send a wakeup packet, which will prompt the receiver to power up its primary radio to listen for the message that follows shortly. The wake-up packet contains the desired node’s ID along with some other information to let the targeted node to wake-up and take part in communication and let all other nodes to go to sleep mode quickly. The VLPM protocol is proposed for applications having low traffic conditions. For high traffic rates, optimization is needed. Analytical results show that the proposed protocol outperforms both synchronized and unsynchronized MAC protocols like T-MAC, SCP-MAC, B-MAC and X-MAC in terms of energy consumption and response time.

Throughput and delay limits of chirp spread spectrum-based IEEE 802.15.4a

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed to provide a low-power, low data rate protocol offering a high reliability. As an amendment to this standard, IEEE 802.15.4a introduces new options for physical layer to enable precision ranging. In this work, we analyzed the theoretical throughput and delay bounds of the unslotted version of chirp spread spectrum PHY-based 802.15.4a. The formulae for transmission between one sender and one receiver for an ideal channel with no transmission errors are given. The throughput and delay bounds are derived for different frequency bands and data rates. Additionally, to measure spectral utilization, we measured the bandwidth efficiency for both the standards. We also compared our results with IEEE 802.15.4. The comparative analysis concludes that the performance of 802.15.4a exceeds 802.15.4 in terms of throughput and delay. The analytical results of throughput are verified by computer simulations. Copyright

Design and analysis of a MAC protocol for wireless body area network using wakeup radio

Wireless sensor networks are widely used for healthcare applications. A new field known as wireless body area networks (WBAN) has emerged to support this area. An energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol can increase the performance of such a network. The major requirements for a WBAN MAC protocol are energy efficiency and low delay. In this paper, we propose a MAC protocol for WBAN using wakeup radio mechanism. We present a detailed analytical model for both energy consumption and delay. We have simulated the proposed MAC and compared the results. It is found that the proposed MAC has improved the performance in terms of energy consumption and delay.

Seamless Interworking Architecture for WBAN in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with QoS Guarantees

The IEEE 802.15.6 standard is a communication standard optimized for low-power and short-range in-body/on-body nodes to serve a variety of medical, consumer electronics and entertainment applications. Providing high mobility with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) to a WBAN user in heterogeneous wireless networks is a challenging task. A WBAN uses a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to gather data from body sensors and forwards it to a remote server through wide range wireless networks. In this paper, we present a coexistence study of WBAN with Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWANs). The main issue is interworking of WBAN in heterogenous wireless networks including seamless handover, QoS, emergency services, cooperation and security. We propose a Seamless Interworking Architecture (SIA) for WBAN in heterogenous wireless networks based on a cost function. The cost function is based on power consumption and data throughput costs. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms typical approaches in terms of throughput, delay and packet loss rate.

Performance analysis of WBAN MAC protocol under different access periods

The IEEE 802.15.6 is a new standard on wireless body area network (WBAN) for short-range, extremely low power wireless communication with high data rates in the vicinity of, or inside, a human body. The standard defines two contention-based channel access schemes: slotted ALOHA and carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) using an alternative binary exponential backoff procedure. The standard supports quality of service (QoS) differentiation through user priorities and access phases. In this study, we develop an analytical model for the estimation of performance metrics such as energy consumption, normalized throughput, and mean frame service time, employing a Markov chain model under nonsaturated heterogeneous traffic scenarios including different access phases specified in the standard for different user priorities and access methods. We conclude that the deployment of exclusive access phase (EAP) is not necessary in a typical WBAN using CSMA/CA because it degrades the overall system throughput, consumes more energy per packet, and results in higher delay for nonemergency nodes.

Analytical modeling of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA protocol under different access periods

The IEEE 802.15.6 standard for wireless body area network (WBAN) defines two contention-based channel access schemes: slotted ALOHA and carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) using an alternative binary exponential backoff procedure. The standard supports quality of service (QoS) differentiation through user priorities and access phases. In this study, we develop an analytical model for the estimation of normalized throughput and mean frame service time performance of the CSMA/CA protocol as described in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, employing a Markov chain model under non-saturated heterogeneous traffic scenarios. We also consider a portion of the access phases of the superframe and analyze its impact on the performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA. Our analysis is validated by accurate computer simulations. Our results show that the IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA employing different access phases degrades the overall system throughput performance and results in higher delay for low priority users.

Multi-hop medium access control protocol for low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks using wake-up radio

The IEEE 802.15.4K Task Group was formed recently to address the low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks. The aim is to collect scheduled and event data from a large number of non-mains powered endpoints that are widely dispersed. The application requirements include reliable data transfer, energy efficiency, and long deployment lifetime. To meet the low energy critical infrastructure monitoring network requirements, we propose a multihop medium access control protocol where the scheduled or event data are routed to the coordinator through the cluster heads. The power consumption of the cluster heads is critical as they use more power than the normal endpoints. Our protocol uses the wake-up radio approach from cluster head to cluster head communication and an efficient guaranteed time slots allocation scheme to minimize the power consumption of the cluster heads. We derive analytical expressions for the average power consumption of cluster heads as well as ordinary endpoints. The results show that our proposed protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and SCP MAC in terms of power consumption. High power efficiency is achieved in both the cluster heads and normal endpoints. Copyright