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.
The network of novel nano-material based nanodevices, known as nanoscale communication networks or nanonetworks has ushered a new communication paradigm in the terahertz band (0.1-10 THz). In this work, first we envisage an architecture of nanonetworks-based Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) monitoring, consisting of nano-macro interface (NM) and nanodevice-embedded Drug Eluting Stents (DESs), termed as nanoDESs. Next, we study the problem of asymmetric data delivery in such nanonetworks-based systems and propose a simple distance-aware power allocation algorithm, named catch-the-pendulum, which optimizes the energy consumption of nanoDESs for communicating data from the underlying nanonetworks to radio frequency (RF) based macro-scale communication networks. The algorithm exploits the periodic change in mean distance between a nanoDES, inserted inside the affected coronary artery, and the NM, fitted in the intercostal space of the rib cage of a patient suffering from a CHD. Extensive simulations confirm superior performance of the proposed algorithm with respect to energy consumption, packet delivery, and shutdown phase.
In this paper, we envisage the architecture of Green Wireless Body Area Nanonetwork (GBAN) as a collection of nanodevices, in which each device is capable of communicating in both the molecular and wireless electromagnetic communication modes. The term green refers to the fact that the nanodevices in such a network can harvest energy from their surrounding environment, so that no nanodevice gets old solely due to the reasons attributed to energy depletion. However, the residual energy of a nanodevice can deplete substantially with the lapse of time, if the rate of energy consumption is not comparable with the rate of energy harvesting. It is observed that the rate of energy harvesting is nonlinear and sporadic in nature. So, the management of energy of the nanodevices is fundamentally important. We specifically address this problem in a ubiquitous healthcare monitoring scenario and formulate it as a cooperative Nash Bargaining game. The optimal strategy obtained from the Nash equilibrium solution provides improved network performance in terms of throughput and delay.
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