In the new era of connectivity, marked by the explosive number of wireless electronic devices and the need for smart and pervasive applications, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications are an emerging technology that enables the seamless device interconnection without the need of human interaction. The use of M2M technology can bring to life a wide range of mHealth applications, with considerable benefits for both patients and healthcare providers. Many technological challenges have to be met, however, to ensure the widespread adoption of mHealth solutions in the future. In this context, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey on M2M systems for mHealth applications from a wireless communication perspective. An end-to-end holistic approach is adopted, focusing on different communication aspects of the M2M architecture. Hence, we first provide a systematic review of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), which constitute the enabling technology at the patient's side, and then discuss end-to-end solutions that involve the design and implementation of practical mHealth applications. We close the survey by identifying challenges and open research issues, thus paving the way for future research opportunities.

SUMMARYThis paper describes a new industrial case on automation, for large scale systems with high environmental impact: the mining ventilation control systems. Ventilation control is essential for the operation of a mine in terms of safety (CO and N O x regulation) and energy optimization. We first discuss a novel regulation architecture, highlighting the interest for a model-based control approach and the use of distributed sensing capabilities thanks to a wireless sensor network (WSN). We propose a new model for underground ventilation. The main components of the system dynamics are described with time-delays, transmission errors, energy losses and concentration profiles. Two different modelbased control approaches, which can embody the complex dynamics of the system, are proposed. The first one resorts to a nonlinear model predictive control strategy (receding horizon) and aims to energy minimization thanks to a continuous operation of the fans. The second one, based on a hybrid description of the model and fans operation, provides automatic verification of the wireless control thanks to abstraction techniques. These control strategies are compared with simulations, in terms of regulation efficiency, energy consumption and need for computational capabilities. The industrial case description and control strategies open new vistas for the development of global system approaches that allow for the optimization of energy consumption of complex large-scale systems.

We consider reliable communications in Body Area Networks (BAN), where a set of nodes placed on human body are connected using wireless links. In order to keep the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) as low as possible for health safety reasons, these networks operate in low transmit power regime, which however, is known to be error prone. It has been observed that the fluctuations of the Received Signal Strength (RSS) at the nodes of a BAN on a moving person show certain regularities and that the magnitude of these fluctuations are significant (5 -20 dB). In this paper, we present BANMAC, a MAC protocol that monitors and predicts the channel fluctuations and schedules transmissions opportunistically when the RSS is likely to be higher. The MAC protocol is capable of providing differentiated service and resolves co-channel interference in the event of multiple co-located BANs in a vicinity. We report the design and implementation details of BANMAC integrated with the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol stack. We present experimental data which show that the packet loss rate (PLR) of BANMAC is significantly lower as compared to that of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC. For comparable PLR, the power consumption of BANMAC is also significantly lower than that of the IEEE 802.15.4. For colocated networks, the convergence time to find a conflict-free channel allocation was approximately 1 s for the centralized coordination mechanism and was approximately 4 s for the distributed coordination mechanism.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies constitute a new paradigm that promises quality\ud of life enhancements in chronic-care patients and elderly people. From a communication perspective,\ud they involve heterogeneous deployments of body and ambient sensors in compex, multihop topologies.\ud Such networks can significantly benefit from the application of cooperative schemes based on network\ud coding, where random linear combinations of the original data packets are transmitted in order to\ud exploit diversity. Nevertheless, network coordination is sometimes required to obtain the full potential\ud of these schemes, especially in the presence of channel errors, requiring the design of efficient, reliable\ud and versatile Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. Motivated by the recent advances in cloud\ud computing, we investigate the possibility of transferring the network coordination to the cloud while\ud maintaining the data exchange and storage at a local data plane. Hence, we design a general framework\ud for the development of cloud-assisted protocols for AAL applications and propose a high-performance\ud and error-resilient MAC scheme with cloud capabilities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

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