Random room mobility model and extra‐wireless body area network communication in hospital buildings

Abstract

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.

Towards Developing a MAC protocol for outer-WBAN communication for pilgrims’ health monitoring during hajj: A feasibility study

“…On contrary, Wi-Fi is suitable for high data rate applications but it consumes high energy which is not acceptable in medical applications. According to the study [10][11][12], ZigBee consumes low power and is suitable for low data rate, low distanced communication thus found the most useful technology as compare to Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Moreover, it has also been observed that ZigBee does not support perfectly at random and dynamically deployment of network topology thus it is evident not to deploy ZigBee for emergency applications or when the network size is comparatively larger (long distanced, lots of nodes and heavy traffic).…”

“…The coordinator or the base station consists of a receiving ZigBee modem and a Wi-Fi module. Authors in another research [10], random room mobility model has been proposed for extra-WBAN communication. Due to the lack of attention in communication issues for extra-WBAN, authors assumed that the coordinator could employ an existing high power network infrastructure e.g., Wi-Fi or cellular networks for transferring medical data to the healthcare centres.…”

An Interference-Aware Traffic-Priority-Based Link Scheduling Algorithm for Interference Mitigation in Multiple Wireless Body Area Networks

“…A typical example of realistic scenarios with practical WBAN applications is health monitoring within a hospital where there are many patients wearing a WBAN [8,9]. In such a scenario, the inter-WBAN interference may occur because data can be transmitted and received by multiple WBANs at the same time.…”

“…Because WBANs are relevant to medical and non-medical applications [5,6,7,8], the reliability as well as performance of WBANs is critical in public environments, such as hospitals or bus stops, where many people wear WBANs [9]. As described in reference [2], the coexistence environment of WBANs is varied from time to time by the mobility of WBANs, the number of traffic flows, and the dynamics of network topology.…”

Trajectory estimation based on mobile network operator data for cellular network simulations

“…In contrast to this work, we consider cellular systems in real environments with underlying real street networks. In [13], the authors propose a random room mobility model (RMM) in order to describe the mobility behavior of patients inside a hospital that are monitored using wireless body area networks (WBAN). With the help of this model, they studied the performance of extra-WBAN communication.…”