S. M. Riazul Islam

The Internet of Things for Health Care: A Comprehensive Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) makes smart objects the ultimate building blocks in the development of cyber-physical smart pervasive frameworks. The IoT has a variety of application domains, including health care. The IoT revolution is redesigning modern health care with promising technological, economic, and social prospects. This paper surveys advances in IoT-based health care technologies and reviews the state-of-the-art network architectures/platforms, applications, and industrial trends in IoT-based health care solutions. In addition, this paper analyzes distinct IoT security and privacy features, including security requirements, threat models, and attack taxonomies from the health care perspective. Further, this paper proposes an intelligent collaborative security model to minimize security risk; discusses how different innovations such as big data, ambient intelligence, and wearables can be leveraged in a health care context; addresses various IoT and eHealth policies and regulations across the world to determine how they can facilitate economies and societies in terms of sustainable development; and provides some avenues for future research on IoT-based health care based on a set of open issues and challenges.

A Study of MAC Protocols for WBANs

The seamless integration of low-power, miniaturised, invasive/non-invasive lightweight sensor nodes have contributed to the development of a proactive and unobtrusive Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN provides long-term health monitoring of a patient without any constraint on his/her normal dailylife activities. This monitoring requires the low-power operation of invasive/non-invasive sensor nodes. In other words, a power-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is required to satisfy the stringent WBAN requirements, including low-power consumption. In this paper, we first outline the WBAN requirements that are important for the design of a low-power MAC protocol. Then we study low-power MAC protocols proposed/investigated for a WBAN with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses. We also review different power-efficient mechanisms for a WBAN. In addition, useful suggestions are given to help the MAC designers to develop a low-power MAC protocol that will satisfy the stringent requirements.

Power-Domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) in 5G Systems: Potentials and Challenges

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is one of the promising radio access techniques for performance enhancement in next-generation cellular communications. Compared to orthogonal frequency division multiple access, which is a well-known high-capacity orthogonal multiple access technique, NOMA offers a set of desirable benefits, including greater spectrum efficiency. There are different types of NOMA techniques, including power-domain and code-domain. This paper primarily focuses on power-domain NOMA that utilizes superposition coding at the transmitter and successive interference cancellation at the receiver. Various researchers have demonstrated that NOMA can be used effectively to meet both network-level and user-experienced data rate requirements of fifth-generation (5G) technologies. From that perspective, this paper comprehensively surveys the recent progress of NOMA in 5G systems, reviewing the state-of-the-art capacity analysis, power allocation strategies, user fairness, and user-pairing schemes in NOMA. In addition, this paper discusses how NOMA performs when it is integrated with various proven wireless communications techniques, such as cooperative communications, multiple-input multiple-output, beamforming, space–time coding, and network coding among others. Furthermore, this paper discusses several important issues on NOMA implementation and provides some avenues for future research.

On PHY and MAC performance in body sensor networks

This paper presents an empirical investigation on the performance of body implant communication using radio frequency (RF) technology. In body implant communication, the electrical properties of the body influence the signal propagation in several ways. We use a Perspex body model (30 cm diameter, 80 cm height and 0.5 cm thickness) filled with a liquid that mimics the electrical properties of the basic body tissues. This model is used to observe the effects of body tissue on the RF communication. We observe best performance at 3cm depth inside the liquid. We further present a simulation study of several low-power MAC protocols for an on-body sensor network and discuss the derived results. Also, the traditional preamble-based TMDA protocol is extended towards a beacon-based TDMA protocol in order to avoid preamble collision and to ensure low-power communication.

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.

Energy Saving Mechanisms for MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is a primary requirement in a wireless sensor network (WSN). This is a major design parameter in medium access control (MAC) protocols for WSN due to limited resources in sensor nodes that include low battery power. Hence a proposed MAC protocol must be energy efficient by reducing the potential energy wastes. Developing such a MAC protocol has been a hot research area in WSN. To avoid wasting the limited energy, various energy saving mechanisms are proposed for MAC protocols. These mechanisms have a common design objective—to save energy to maximize the network lifetime. This paper presents a survey on various energy saving mechanisms that are proposed for MAC protocols in WSN. We present a detailed discussion of these mechanisms and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. We also discuss MAC protocols that use these energy saving mechanisms.

D-MoSK Modulation in Molecular Communications

Molecular communication in nanonetworks is an emerging communication paradigm that uses molecules as information carriers. In molecule shift keying (MoSK), where different types of molecules are used for encoding, transmitter and receiver complexities increase as the modulation order increases. We propose a modulation technique called depleted MoSK (D-MoSK) in which, molecules are released if the information bit is 1 and no molecule is released for 0. The proposed scheme enjoys reduced number of the types of molecules for encoding. Numerical results show that the achievable rate is considerably higher and symbol error rate (SER) performance is better in the proposed technique.

An Internet of Things-based health prescription assistant and its security system design

Abstract Today, telemedicine has a great reputation because of its capacity to provide quality healthcare services to remote locations. To achieve its purposes, telemedicine utilizes a number of wireless technologies as well as the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is redefining the capacity of telemedicine in terms of improved and seamless healthcare services. In this regard, this paper contributes to the set of features of telemedicine by proposing a model for an IoT-based health prescription assistant (HPA), which helps each patient to follow the doctors recommendations properly. This paper also designs a security system that ensures user authentication and protected access to resources and services. The security system authenticates a user based on the OpenID standard. An access control mechanism is implemented to prevent unauthorized access to medical devices. Once the authentication is successful, the user is issued an authorization ticket, which this paper calls a security access token (SAT). The SAT contains a set of privileges that grants the user access to medical IoT devices and their services and/or resources. The SAT is cryptographically protected to guard against forgery. A medical IoT device verifies the SAT prior to serving a request, and thus, ensures protected access. A prototype of the proposed system has been implemented to experimentally analyze and compare the resource efficiency of different SAT verification approaches in terms of a number of performance metrics, including computation and communication overhead.

The IoT: Exciting Possibilities for Bettering Lives: Special application scenarios.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a Network of Recognizable Physical objects (or things). It includes anyone, anything, any service, and any network connected to the Internet used to retrieve information at any time and from anywhere. The IoT is smart enough to offer us solutions for a wide range of applications, including intelligent transportation systems, personal communications, consumer electronics, health care, organizational services, securities and monitoring, and industrial controls.

A TR-UWB downconversion autocorrelation receiver for wireless body area network

Low power UWB receiver architecture is proposed for a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). This receiving technology is a synergy of existing downconversion-based narrowband rejection mechanism in RF front end and signal processing in frequency domain. Frequency components of converted and filtered UWB pulses are separated into real and imaginary parts, independently correlated and effectively combined to achieve an improved output Signal to noise ratio (SNR). An extensive mathematical analysis has been performed to formulate the close-form expressions for SNRs in order to compare system performances toward favorable BER under BPSK modulation scheme. Analysis shows that optimal rotation of coordination plays an important role for the enhancement of receiving SNR which is further confirmed by computer simulation. A wide range of link level simulation (LLS) urges that the proposed system is more power efficient in higher-order modulation (HOM) schemes. Transmitted Reference (TR) scheme has been considered as the basis for wideband communication.