Thanks to their arising abilities to influence the human lifestyle, along with reducing the healthcare systems’ cost, wireless body area networks (WBANs) still form a strongly growing research field. Recent advances focus on the opportunities of coexistence and communication between a group of WBANs, that will forward the sensing data, using persons as network relays, until reaching a remote analysis server or cloud servers via the Internet, forming thus a body-to-body network (BBN). Such new-style networks support a range of innovative and promising applications, including ubiquitous healthcare (U-health), interactive games, and military, to cite a few. In this paper, we first present the evolution of the single WBAN concept to the cooperative network of multiple WBANs, giving rise to the BBN concept. A synopsis of the WBAN and BBN respective standards and applications is given, and the emerging BBN challenges are highlighted. Then, we present and discuss the existing WBAN proposals, especially the candidate WBAN protocols that could be adapted and used in BBNs, focusing on four intrinsically related axes of great importance for BBN design: energy efficiency, mobility prediction, quality of service (QoS) and security. Further BBN open issues are also investigated, namely, the wireless propagation between humans carrying wearable devices, the interference, storage and privacy issues as well as the heterogeneity of BBN devices and traffic.
Abstract-In recent years, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have gained increasing interest in the research community and become an emerging technology, especially in healthcare services. This position paper focuses on the energy optimization issue and the joint routing and MAC protocols in WBANs. We extend upon our previous model on the Energy-Aware Topology Design for WBANs (EAWD), so as to include PHY and MAC-layer WBAN specifications. Indeed, EAWD model considered the topology constraints by minimizing the number of relay nodes, in order to reduce the total energy consumption, as well as the total network installation cost. Yet, EAWD involved quite rough assumptions, omitting overhead considerations, due to MAC routing and physical clear channel assessment problems. Therefore, we first introduce the EAWD model and discuss its limitations. Then, we present our proposal, the Enhanced EAWD (EEAWD), and assess its performance through a synthesis comparison with EAWD and related proposals in the literature.
Abstract-Smart mobile people have a great potential to extend the existing Internet of Things infrastructures by implementing genuine ubiquitous healthcare (U-health) applications, ensuring anywhere and anytime patients connectivity. Through the forwarding of sensing data from person to person until reaching a connected medical server, concrete U-health becomes true with the emerging of future Body-to-Body Networks. Indeed, the coexistence of multiple WBANs (Wireless Body Area Networks), the communication and interactions between them extend the classical concept of WBAN and present the new paradigm referred to as Body-to-Body Network (BBN). This paradigm supports a number of innovative applications such as U-health, entertainment, interactive gaming and military, to cite a few.In this paper, we present a survey of BBNs focusing on three principal axes: energy efficiency, mobility prediction, and quality of service (QoS). Then, we present and discuss different candidate protocols that can be used in BBNs, while illustrating main BBN design challenges and several open issues.
International audienceIn this paper, we identify and exploit opportunities for cooperation between a group of mobile Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), forming a Body-to-Body Network (BBN), through inter-body interference detection and subsequent mitigation. Thus, we consider a dynamic system composed of several BBNs and we analyze the joint mutual and cross-technology interference problem due to the utilization of a limited number of channels by different transmission technologies (i.e., ZigBee and WiFi) sharing the same radio spectrum. To this end, we propose a game theoretical approach to address the problem of Socially-aware Interference Mitigation (SIM) in BBNs, where WBANs are " social " and interact with each other. Our approach considers a two-stage channel allocation scheme: a BBN-stage for inter-WBANs' communications and a WBAN-stage for intra-WBAN communications. We demonstrate that the proposed BBN-stage and WBAN-stage games admit exact potential functions, and we develop a Best-Response (BR-SIM) algorithm that converges to Nash equilibrium points. A second algorithm, named Sub-Optimal Randomized Trials (SORT-SIM), is then proposed and compared to BR-SIM in terms of efficiency and computation time. We further compare the BR-SIM and SORT-SIM algorithms to two power control algorithms in terms of signal-to-interference ratio and aggregate interference, and show that they outperform the power control schemes in several cases. Numerical results, obtained in several realistic mobile scenarios, show that the proposed schemes are indeed efficient in optimizing the channel allocation in medium-to-large-scale BBNs
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