Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications: Protocol Stack Review

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) supporting healthcare applications are in early development stage but offer valuable contributions at monitoring, diagnostic, or therapeutic levels. They cover real-time medical information gathering obtained from different sensors with secure data communication and low power consumption. As a consequence of the increasing interest in the application of this type of networks, several articles dealing with different aspects of such systems have been published recently. In this paper, we compile and compare technologies and protocols published in the most recent researches, seeking WBAN issues for medical monitoring purposes to select the most useful solutions for this area of networking. The most important features under consideration in our analysis include wireless communication protocols, frequency bands, data bandwidth, transmission distance, encryption, authentication methods, power consumption, and mobility. Our study demonstrates that some characteristics of surveyed protocols are very useful to medical appliances and patients in a WBAN domain.

Medium Access Control (MAC) for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): Superframe structure, multiple access technique, taxonomy, and challenges

“…The Narrowband (NB), Ultra-wideband (UWB), and Human Body Communications (HBC) are the Superframe structures, have been considered for human beings to animals using Slotted Aloha and CSMA/CA. The application, transport, network, MAC and PHY layers have been considered for Superframe structures of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 in WBAN [16]. These layers have been investigated to establish an association between Superframe structure using Slotted Aloha, CSMA/CA and TDMA.…”

“…Hence, IEEE 802.15 Task Group 6 (TG6) was decided to design low power sensors to monitor the patient's vital signs and the health conditions of a sportsman in different sports activities. The first draft version of IEEE 802.15.6 for MAC and PHY layers was publicized in 2012 [16]. This draft version describes IEEE 802.15.6 which divides the whole Superframe structure into different channels and beacons.…”

Energy-Efficient Protocol of Link Scheduling in Cognitive Radio Body Area Networks for Medical and Healthcare Applications

“…Recently, three physical layers for wireless communication in or around the human body have been recommended by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard for WBANs: Human body communication (HBC), narrow band, and ultra-wide band [1]. WBANs offer various applications in both medical and non-medical fields; for instance, monitoring emergency data and collecting the periodic data of patients in hospitals [2][3][4]. Figure 1 shows the typical architectural scenario for WBANs in medical applications in a three-tier communication model [2,3].…”

Lifetime maximization by partitioning approach in wireless sensor networks

“…Each sensor node is equipped with a battery, a micro-controller, memory, and a transceiver, whereas the sink node collects data for processing and decision-making [4]. The sensor node monitors, collects, and sends information to an allocated area [5]. This means that sensor nodes should operate in a limited energy budget to provide support for applications with an affordable cost [6].…”