Convergecast in Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is a recent challenging area in the domain of health monitoring. There are several concerns in this area ranging from energy efficient communication to designing delays efficient protocols that support nodes dynamicity induced by human body mobility. This paper focuses on the convergecast or data gathering protocols in WBAN. Our contribution is twofold. First, we extensively analyze the impact of postural body mobility on various classes of multihop convergecast strategies. Our study does not limit itself to the existing state-of-the-art in WBAN, we adapted to WBAN settings strategies from the areas of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). We evaluate all these strategies via the OMNeT++ simulator that we enriched with realistic human body mobility models and channel models issued from the recent research on biomedical and health informatics. Our simulations show that existing results in DTN and WSN cannot be just extrapolated to WBAN without a deeper investigation. That is, existing convergecast strategies for DTN or WSN do not perform well with postural body movements because of the topological partitioning provoked by important link attenuations due to signal obstructions by clothes or body itself. Our extensive simulations give valuable insights and directions for designing efficient convergecast adaptive strategies in WBAN. Second, we propose and evaluate two novel classes of convergecast strategies. The first class integrates in the routing information the link attenuation while the second one exploits multi (pre-established) paths to the sink node. We stress all the strategies under a realistic channel model and present an extensive analysis in terms of resiliency to mobility, end-to-end delay and energy consumption for seven different mobility patterns. We advocate that, so far, there is no strategy for convergecast in WBAN that optimizes all the above criteria for all possible mobility patterns. However, each considered strategy can be a good candidate for a specific combination of parameters with a specific mobility pattern.

BAN-GZKP: Optimal Zero Knowledge Proof Based Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

“…We therefore consider as case study the convergecast problem where Data messages sent by source nodes are collected by a specific node in the network called sink. We enrich representative convergecast strategies specifically designed for multihop WBAN mentioned in [26] and [27] with BANZKP and BAN-GZKP schemes, respectively. Note that the original BANZKP scheme requires an end-to-end authentication where all the authentication messages are transparent to relay nodes.…”

“…• Multi-Paths based Strategies: are based on predetermined paths and use these overlay paths as a reliability mechanism. An example is All Parents to All Parents (APAP) strategy [26]. In APAP, each source node sends a message to maximum two pre-determined parents.…”

“…• Gossip-based Strategies: use flooding. In this class we choose FloodToSink [26], where a source diffuses messages to all its neighbours, then continue to forward messages to all their neighbours and so on. In this case, every packet has a parameter, Time to Life (TTL), to limit the number of forwarding.…”

“…The source will chose the next hop among replying nodes and sends data packets to the chosen one. In this class we investigate strategy MiniAtt [26]. This strategy choses one node who has the minimal estimate attenuation to the sink; if no Reply has been received for a while, the source will re-send the Request.…”

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN)-Based Telemedicine for Emergency Care

“…WBAN network topology and cross-layer optimization were discussed in References [23,24], which optimized cost effectiveness through a multi-objective cost function. In Reference [25], a novel convergecast strategy, especially for WBAN, was designed using a delay-tolerant network and wireless sensor network in the OMNeT++ framework. In Reference [26], an authentication scheme for a medical body area network was designed, and its reliability was demonstrated.…”