Distributed virtual network interfaces to support intra-PAN and PAN-to-infrastructure connectivity

ZigBee is popular for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices because of its low power consumption, built-in security method and ratified specifications. With these features, it is also suitable to be used with medical sensor devices. Medical sensors in a human body self organize a ZigBee Personal Area Network (PAN). These PANs are interconnected and form a HealthNet. For the interconnection, a ZigBee PAN detects existence of another PAN with beacon detection or active channel scan. Different ZigBee interconnection schemes are used after detection. PAN bridge method uses special bridge node that works for different PANs with time division method. PAN merge method temporarily changes PAN coordinator's role as bridge node and merges two PANs. Peer-to-peer network temporarily share all resources when two PANs are met, but all PANs have to use the same channel and operate as an ad-hoc network. In this paper, we perform extensive evaluations using NS-2 simulations to compare PAN interconnection methods. Results show that the PAN bridge is the most useful method because it is not affected by router/node ratio and is applicable to different channel usages.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a discrete event system which include a different devices of the network like sensor nodes, calculating, power consumed, and communication units to monitor specific phenomenon such as environmental information. Emerging operation for the wireless sensor networks applications are consist of resources and warehouse management, building automation, civil infrastructure monitoring, healthcare, and security. Modeling and simulation are a good tools test and examine the working and to specify the effective techniques that proposed for WSNs. Analytical modeling delivers quick vision for the techniques developed for WSNs but it is unsuccessful to give real calculations because (WSN) are very limited energy and have a variable number of sensor nodes as the network requirements. This paper aimed to study the behavior of a mobile device using zigbee protocol entire a limited of different personal area network (PAN), each one have different devices and distances. The configuration of this paper contains three PANs, (1, 2, and 3). This network includes a mobile node, originally located at PAN 1. The three PANs have a transmitted power organized to be (2 mW), to ensure that the covering areas do not interference with another one. The results shows that mobile node connected to (PAN 1) through the first (3.6 minutes) of the simulation period. After that the node disconnected from the PAN 1, then quickly links to PAN 2. After (10.6 minutes), the node leave PAN 2 and promptly connects to (PAN 3). The graphs that get from this research proves that the dropped data at its minimum value for the most simulation time, except some spikes around (4, 11 and 14) minutes. This scenario are modeled and simulated using (OPNET) software.

The present paper studies the performance of a high-speed third-generation (3.5G) networking technology (Enhanced Uplink), in collaboration with well known personal area networks (i.e. Zigbee and Bluetooth) and wireless local area network (WLAN) technology, for delivering pervasive healthcare applications. The association of personal and local area networks along with the 3.5G network is a critical factor for successful development of pervasive e-health services perceived by end-users. In this paper, we propose a methodology for performance assessment based on the joint uplink transmission of voice, real-time video and biomedical data, such us electrocardiogram, vital signals and heart sounds. Various scenarios were concerned for point of care applications in real-time and near-real-time modes and in random locations, where no other system but 3.5G is available. The accomplishment of quality of service (QoS) was explored through the delay and the jitter of the networks' parameters, attributing the joint network system for best performance in the context of the desired e-health services.

In this paper, the results of an on-body, line-of-sight (LOS), multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) channel sounding investigation are reported. Transmission takes place between on-body antennas and a uniform linear array, positioned at close range and within line-of- sight of each other. Due to the on-body location of the antennas, the influence of actual radio channel can no longer be separated from the effects of user behaviour and body proximity. This paper therefore argues that the composite channel must be considered. Post-processing of the recorded channels shows that their capacities outperform those from equivalent Rayleigh channels. Taking into account the clear LOS in the experiment, this appears counter-intuitive to the well-known fact that uncorrelated scattering results in high capacity. An analysis of the results highlights some less familiar facts and leads to an overview of capacity generating mechanisms in MIMO systems. The paper adds an analysis of the sensitivity of the capacity to the properties of the channel matrix, which is used for a discussion of the practical use of MIMO in personal and body area networks.

Personal area networks such as home or small office LANs are usually more vulnerable to cyber-attacks than those with dedicated support staff and the ability to invest consistently in security defenses. In this paper I propose leveraging physical characteristics of these personal area networks in order to enable non-technical individuals to secure their networks or at least be aware that their devices have been compromised. This proposal leverages records of location for mobile devices, proximity authentication, and individual homophily. In this work, I summarize previous studies on securing personal networks, proximity authentication, and software attestation. I then present a preliminary design for the detection of and recovery from infection for personal area networks. Limitations and future work are also discussed.

In this paper we propose a new efficient authentication protocol that reduces a burden of computation for digital signature generation/verification on mobile devices in the personal area network. In particular, we focus on eliminating the traditional public key operations on mobile devices without any assistance of a signature server. Moreover, the proposed protocol provides a simplified procedure for certificate status management to alleviate communication and computational costs on mobile devices in the personal area network.

In mission critical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) accurate timestamping of the occurrence of events measured by the sensor nodes is often required together with a high degree of reliability. While precise timestamping requires synchronization of the sensor nodes, reliability is obtained by adding redundancy in all potential single point of failure nodes. In this paper, we focus on a ZigBee-based WSN using two personal area network (PAN) coordinators with different PAN identifiers (IDs) and, for this configuration, we propose a solution where if the primary PAN coordinator goes down, connections are transferred to the other by changing the PAN ID of the nodes. Our proposed solution provides significant gains in terms of recovery speed and timing synchronization accuracy in comparison to a solution that is proposed in the literature.

This paper proposes a low power Vehicular-to-Machine (V2M) communication system consisting of crowd servers, moving vehicles and low-power fixed roadside devices. In order to save energy of roadside devices, it employs an enhanced ZigBee protocol with fast network association and switching capability. The vehicles can collect information from various types of roadside devices and process them for their own, as well as uploading some of them to corresponding servers for public use. In the system, a roadside device, playing role of the ZigBee end device, detects a vehicular station (VS) by hearing its beacon signal that requests necessary types of information. The device then associates the personal area network (PAN) that is formed by the VS and repeats the association and disconnection for different PANs so that it can send information to all requesting VSs. With current ZigBee protocol, however, it is difficult for the devices to handover between PANs passing by at high speed. In order to enable smooth and fast network association, we propose a fast PAN association / handover algorithm that refers to PAN subscription history and receiving power of beacon. It is confirmed via computer simulations that the proposed method enables faster network association and remarkably improves information delivery rate compared with the original ZigBee protocol.

Personal area networks (PANs) are networks in which portable devices carried by a user are connected to each other by wireless interfaces. Mobile personal area networks (MPANs) allow a PAN to be mobile, enabling seamless Internet access even when the user is moving. A PAN router has a wireless access interface and connects the devices in the MPAN to the Internet. There might be two or more MPAN routers in an MPAN and it is necessary for the MPAN router most suitable for the location and/or situation to be in operation. For example, if the MPAN router currently operating as the default router fails, another available MPAN router should start to operate as the default, or an MPAN router might be selected from those available according to QoS. We propose methods for the switching and selection of MPAN routers. We show by experiment that they enable fast switching and selection of the MPAN router most suitable for various QoS.

The proliferation of mobile computing devices including laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wearable computers has created a demand for wireless personal area networks (PANs). PANs allow proximal devices to share information and resources. The mobile nature of these devices places unique requirements on PANs, such as low power consumption, frequent make-and-break connections, resource discovery and utilization, and international regulations. This paper examines wireless technologies appropriate for PANs and reviews promising research in resource discovery and service utilization.

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), a binding is an association between a sensor and an actuator. The binding mechanism defined in the ZigBee specification is restricted within a personal area network (PAN). For a complex WSN application, it is desired to have an inter-PAN binding mechanism to combine sensors and actuators from different PANs, respectively. In this paper, we have proposed a gateway-based inter-PAN binding mechanism for global event detection and action invocation. By collecting device capabilities from each intra-PAN gateway, an inter-PAN gateway is used to create a binding specification. Once all events defined in the binding specification are received from related intra-PAN gateways, the inter-PAN gateway would initiate corresponding actions on all associated intra-PAN gateways. To demonstrate the practicality, an inter-PAN binding system for ZigBee sensors and actuators has been implemented based on the universal plug and play (UPnP) and representational state transfer (REST) Web services for intra-PAN gateway discovery and device capability collection. Also, a Web-based wizard has been provided to create binding specification. It is believed that the technique presented in this paper would enable the interaction between ZigBee PANs to perform wide-ranging WSN applications.

IEEE 802.5.4-based personal area networks (PANs) are expected to play a key role for emerging mobile health applications. In this work, we evaluate network performance and reliability in the case where several PANs are forced to share the same channel. Based on extensive simulations, we show that inter-network interaction may lead to long periods of disruption, even when the average network performance is very good and the channel is only lightly loaded. We demonstrate that this is mostly due to lack of coordination between networks, rather than limitations of duty cycle or memory.

Due to the less stringent requirements of some PAN (personal area network) wireless standards such as (802.15.3, ZigBee(802.15.4)), low cost ring oscillators operating in low power are frequently applied to perform frequency synthesis in the receivers. In this paper last passage time models are applied to model the phase noise of such ring oscillators. This model leads to significant improvement in power/ phase noise trade-off. It shows that the power required is 3-4 times larger than what conventional first passage time model predicts, thus providing better design guideline. Comparison between first passage and last passage time probability density functions are also presented to highlight their differences.

An efficient reconstruction approach for improving Bluetree scatternet formation in personal area networks

E-textile technology has earned a great deal of interest in many fields; however, existing wearable network protocols are not optimized for use with conductive yarn. In this paper, some of the basic properties of conductive textiles and requirements on wearable personal area networks (PANs) are reviewed. Then, we present a wearable personal network (WPN), which is a four-layered wearable PAN using bus topology. We have designed the WPN to be a lightweight protocol to work with a variety of microcontrollers. The profile layer is provided to make the application development process easy. The data link layer exchanges frames in a master-slave manner in either the reliable or best-effort mode. The lower part of the data link layer and the physical layer of WPN are made of a fabric serial-bus interface which is capable of measuring bus signal properties and adapting to medium variation. After a formal verification of operation and performances of WPN, we implemented WPN communication modules (WCMs) on small flexible printed circuit boards. In order to demonstrate the behavior of our WPN on a textile, we designed a WPN tutorial shirt prototype using implemented WCMs and conductive yarn.