Wireless body area networks (WBANs) can help in enabling efficient patient monitoring solution for ubiquitous healthcare. Communication in WBANs is undertaken in two phases: intra-WBAN and extra-WBAN. The prevailing WBANs use cellular network or WiFi in the extra-WBAN phase involving communication between the on-body coordinator and access points (APs) connected to the medical server through the internet. The medical applications of the WBANs have stringent requirements of low end-to-end delay and high packet delivery ratio. The authors evaluate the performance of extra-WBAN communication in the network of WBANs which is deployed within a building environment. They proposed a mobility model named random room mobility (RRM), which is used to capture the dynamics of WBAN user mobility within the building. They studied the performance of extra-WBAN communication using the proposed mobility model and a random waypoint mobility model. The metrics used in evaluating the performance are packet drop ratio, average node-to-AP delay and average residual energy per node. The authors show that with an increase in the number of WBANs, the traffic generation rate and the payload size have high impact on the packet loss in the network. They studied the performance of extra-WBAN communication using the priority mode available in IEEE 802.11 for provisioning quality-of-service (QoS). We show that it is suitable for medical applications, when the size of network consisting of WBANs, including the QoS-enabled WBANs, is small.
Heterogeneous networks are designed to offload or route some of data traffics of mobile networks through other co‐located wireless access networks. This technique apparently increases the capacity of mobile network. In such networks, a vertical handover process plays an important role in providing seamless and uninterrupted connectivity as well as the required level of quality‐of‐service along with a wide coverage for all mobile nodes. Traditional vertical handover algorithms that are based on single criterion (eg, received signal strength) are not performing well in terms of excess handover rates, ping‐pong effects, handover delays, handover cost, etc. This research presents an efficient multicriteria‐based vertical handover decision‐making algorithm for heterogeneous networks. This algorithm uses a two‐step execution procedure, the first step evaluates whether the handover is needed or not before initiating a handover process, if needed, then a set of feasible solutions are generated for the vertical handover problem formulated as a multi‐objective optimization problem with two objective functions such as quality factor of networks and handover processing cost. In the second step, an optimal solution (ie, an appropriate access network) for handover is obtained using a hybrid approach of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). Our simulation study shows that the proposed algorithm performs well as compared to some other existing algorithms (ie, single‐criterion based, multicriteria with AHP, multicriteria with TOPSIS, and multicriteria with both AHP and TOPSIS) in terms of performance metrics such as handover rate, delay, cost, and energy consumption.
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