Performance Study of Localization Techniques in Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network is greatly evolved in recent years. Technological advancements in wireless networks are intended to develop various fields especially in medical domain. Nowadays, remote health monitoring is possible by the enormous growth of wireless body area sensor networks. The Wireless Body Area Sensor Network monitors the human health by using wearable body sensors, and sends the status of the human health to the medical experts. Body nodes will be placed on, in and around the human body. The major key issue in Wireless Body Area Sensor Network is power management. Since batteries used in sensors are very tiny, it tends to have a minimal lifetime. In order to increase the lifetime of the sensor node, the energy needs to be utilized in an efficient manner. In this paper we have proposed conditional re-transmission technique to minimize the energy consumption. So the sensor nodes lifetime will get increased and in turn Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks lifetime will also be increased. By increasing the lifetime of the sensor nodes, the batteries or sensor nodes need not to be replaced frequently.

Problem statement: The Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASNs) is a wireless network used for communication among sensor nodes operating on or inside the human body in order to monitor vital body parameters and movements. This study surveys the state-of-the-art on Wireless Body Area Networks, discussing the major components of research in this area including physiological sensing and preprocessing, WBASNs communication techniques and data fusion for gathering data from sensors. In addition, data analysis and feedback will be presented including feature extraction, detection and classification of human related phenomena. Approach: Comparative studies of the technologies and techniques used in such systems will be provided in this study, using qualitative comparisons and use case analysis to give insight on potential uses for different techniques. Results and Conclusion: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) technologies are considered as one of the key of the research areas in computer science and healthcare application industries. Sensor supply chain and communication technologies used within the system and power consumption therein, depend largely on the use case and the characteristics of the application. Authors conclude that Life-saving applications and thorough studies and tests should be conducted before WBANs can be widely applied to humans, particularly to address the challenges related to robust techniques for detection and classification to increase the accuracy and hence the confidence of applying such techniques without physician intervention.

One of the most promising fields is Wireless Body Area Sensor network (WBASN) which consists of a large number of wearable or implantable sensor nodes for collecting physiological data from the patients. The healthcare data is most sensitive digital data which contains high, delicate private data, and it needs to be shared among the peoples such as health specialists, pharmacist, family members, insurance companies, hospitals, etc. Due to the openness of wireless network, WBASN is vulnerable to a different variety of attacks; it needs high-security mechanisms to secure the data. The breach of healthcare information is one of the most crucial concern nowadays. In this paper, we mainly emphasise the general outlook of wireless body area sensor networks, which includes the architecture of healthcare system, various research domain, need of security and privacy of WBASNs. Further, the pro and cons of different security mechanism for WBASNs are discussed.

In this survey, we review the current research on Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASNs). This technology is playing key role in different aspects of life such as entertainment, emergency services, sports and medical health care applications. We identify the issues of WBASNs for medical and health care services. Different techniques and several algorithms are designed to handle the problems of energy consumption, delay and route selection in WBASNs. This study also discusses how different algorithms use different techniques to minimize energy consumption, delay, path selection cost and computational complexity. A detailed hierarchy of existing algorithms is included in this work to better understand the emerging issues in WBASN. MATLAB simulations for different algorithms are performed to analyze the path loss and energy consumption of disconnected nodes. We also check the connectivity between employ nodes and out body server on LOS and NLOS due to frequent human body movements. We see some connections break due to absorption of cloths and human body, and also take time to setup a connection, which causes delay and energy utilization. From this study we found that the algorithms designed to tackle the problem of emergency should be priority-base, thermal-aware and easily manage its energy range for sending data when disconnection occurs due to partitioning.

Recent advances in Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) technology has become a leading approach for several promising applications in the medical field. WBASN is the network is built with different kinds of physiological sensors which measures different vital parameters on the human body for the purpose of monitoring the patients. Prediction and modeling are very two important issues which are required to address while building a WBASN. To enhance the long-term critical health monitoring, a robust predictive approach should be incorporated in every WBASN system and it leads to saving computation time and increasing the energy.In this paper, we describe the use of polynomial regression for predicting and modeling biological functions. We also describe how effective different orders of polynomials can be. There are four functions that we use for this purpose: blood pressure, scalp EEG signals, the walking gait of people with neurodegenerative disorders, and lastly motor movement signals. We have also used two different degrees of polynomial functions to determine the predictive value.

Today, there is an emerging interest in Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASNs) for the real-time monitoring of patients and early chronic disease detection. In this context, this paper presents a synopsis survey of healthcare monitoring via the IEEE 802.15.6 (UWB) protocol. We intend to propose a survey of the current issues of wearable physiological monitoring signals and devices, application areas, and reliability in WBASNs. To help elderly and disabled people, it would be beneficial to use a wireless transportable gadget at home to gather useful data in traditional human activities. This will manage regular hospital and emergency department appointments and will monitor crucial physiological signals real-time. This paper will also present a study on new wireless technologies intended for body area sensor networks, including signal processing problems, spectral allocation, security, and future research challenges of WBASNs.

Wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs) have gained much importance in current research domains and are implemented in real scenarios like hospitals for monitoring patients real-time data. Tiny sensing nodes in WBASNs have limited processing, storing capacity and battery life. The communication of sensing nodes is made energy efficient to conserve the energy of the resource scarce WBASNs. In our paper, we have proposed a routing protocol known as Hybrid Rapid Response Routing (HRRR) protocol for delay-sensitive traffic such as real-time health related data of patients. Time-critical data is forwarded with much less delay due to the minimization of end-to-end delay. Large coverage area of HRRR protocol made its implementation possible in hospital environment to gather the patients data. Therefore, our proposed scheme best fits the requirement for WBASNs in hospitals using sensing nodes for communication. Simulations results show that our proposed protocol has shown much improved results in terms of increased network life time, stability, throughput, and energy efficiency as compared to other existing routing protocols of WBASNs.

In today’s world, the increasing cost of healthcare and tremendous growth of elderly population introduced a major issue for medical monitoring and healthcare applications. A tiny sensor attached outside/inside the human body in Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) monitors the surrounding environment and function of human body. Meanwhile, the heat dissipated from antenna and sensor node’s circuitry and antenna deteriorates human tissue. Thus it is very important to design a routing protocol in WBASN by incorporating the effect of temperature into routing metrics. A WBASN consists of heterogeneous nodes; therefore, the routing protocols must be designed to balance traffic among these sensor nodes. Vital signals of human body require different quality of service for different data types. Thus designing QoS aware routing protocols is a challenging task. In this paper, conventional temperature and QoS aware routing protocols are compared and open issues in routing protocol design are discussed.

In recent years, wireless body area sensor network (WBASN) has gained a lot of attention from researchers for its potential application in medical care and health care fields. However, previous studies are typically involved in performance of WBASN, and most research has barely considered the details of system design. This paper presents a health care monitoring system. The design of the system is detailedly described. The evaluation result shows that the system can be easily deployed and suitable for health care monitoring.

Advances in wearable devices and pervasive computing provide unprecedented opportunity for ubiquitous realtime e-Healthcare and patient monitoring by placing wirelessly connected sensors in, on, and around the body of patients. Due to the privacy-sensitive and mission-critical nature of these wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs), as well as the desire to use them for long-time uninterrupted monitoring of patients' vital physiological signals, the privacy/security and energy efficiency of WBASNs are of primary concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel In-network AES Equivalent (IAE) mechanism to protect the security/privacy and maintain good energy efficiency for WBASNs at the same time. IAE achieves this goal by outsourcing part of the energy-consuming cryptographic operation to other deliberately-selected peer sensor nodes so as to balance the energy consumption of the entire network. An analytical model is proposed to characterize the computation and communication energy consumption of IAE, based on which we optimize the outsourcing under given security constraints. Through extensive simulations, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed mechanism in prolonging the network lifetime under given security requirements.

Wireless body area sensor networks will revolutionize health care services by remote, continuous and non-invasive monitoring. Body area sensor networks (BASN) should monitor various physiological parameters of a person for a long period of time. Thus, efficient energy usage in sensor nodes is essential in order to provide a long life time for the network. This paper investigates the effect of adding a relay network to the network of body sensors to reduce energy consumption of sensor nodes when transmitting data to the sink.

Remote monitoring of the vital signs of a patient at home is becoming increasingly important. Wireless body area sensor networks (BAN) provide a convenient platform for health monitoring. A typical biomonitoring application running on wireless BAN has stringent timing and energy requirements. In this context, a cycle accurate simulator of biomonitoring application running on wireless BAN network is a critical tool for the developer. In this paper, we present a SystemC-based fast simulator that can provide accurate timing and energy estimated for health monitoring applications on wireless BAN, which is then used to strategize the optimizations towards critical functions and/or components. Our case study with MEMSWear-Biomonitoring application shows the accuracy and utility of our simulator.

In this paper, we study the problem of traffic analysis attacks in wireless body area sensor networks. When these networks are used in health-care for remote patient monitoring, traffic analysis can reveal the type of medical sensors mounted on the patient, and this information may be used to infer the patient's health problems. We show that simple signal processing methods can be used effectively for performing traffic analysis attacks and identifying the sensor types in a rather weak adversary model. We then investigate possible traffic obfuscation mechanisms aiming at hiding the regular patterns in the observable wireless traffic. Among the investigated countermeasures, traffic shaping, a mechanism that introduces carefully chosen delays for message transmissions, appears to be the best choice, as it achieves close to optimal protection and incurs no overhead.

In this paper, a random access protocol for quality of service (QoS) support targeted for medical wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs) is proposed. In this proposal, the sensor nodes are classified into nodes of life-critical health information, and nodes of non-critical health information. The proposed QoS-based MAC protocol prioritizes the critical packets access to the transmission medium by cutting of the number of retransmissions of the collided non critical packets. Therefore, the critical traffic throughput is increased and its rejection rate is decreased while maintaining the non critical traffic QoS parameters above a minimum provisioned level. The proposed protocol is evaluated analytically and through simulation. The obtained results demonstrate a dramatic increase in the critical traffic throughput.

In recent years, interests in the applications of Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) is noticeably developed. WBASN is playing a significant role to get the real time and precise data with reduced level of energy consumption. It comprises of tiny, lightweight and energy restricted sensors, placed in/on the human body, to monitor any ambiguity in body organs and measure various biomedical parameters. In this study, a protocol named Distance Aware Relaying Energy-efficient (DARE) to monitor patients in multi-hop Body Area Sensor Networks (BASNs) is proposed. The protocol operates by investigating the ward of a hospital comprising of eight patients, under different topologies by positioning the sink at different locations or making it static or mobile. Seven sensors are attached to each patient, measuring different parameters of Electrocardiogram (ECG), pulse rate, heart rate, temperature level, glucose level, toxins level and motion. To reduce the energy consumption, these sensors communicate with the sink via an on-body relay, affixed on the chest of each patient. The body relay possesses higher energy resources as compared to the body sensors as, they perform aggregation and relaying of data to the sink node. A comparison is also conducted conducted with another protocol of BAN named, Mobility-supporting Adaptive Threshold-based Thermal-aware Energy-efficient Multi-hop ProTocol (M-ATTEMPT). The simulation results show that, the proposed protocol achieves increased network lifetime and efficiently reduces the energy consumption, in relative to M-ATTEMPT protocol.