Interest in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has increased significantly in recent years thanks to the advances in microelectronics and wireless communications. Owing to the very stringent application requirements in terms of reliability, energy efficiency, and low device complexity, the design of these networks requires the definition of new protocols with respect to those used in general purpose wireless sensor networks. This motivates the effort in research activities and in standardisation process of the last years. This survey paper aims at reporting an overview of WBAN main applications, technologies and standards, issues in WBANs design, and evolutions. Some case studies are reported, based on both real implementation and experimentation on the field, and on simulations. These results have the aim of providing useful insights for WBAN designers and of highlighting the main issues affecting the performance of these kind of networks.

A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks: Technologies and Design Challenges

In wireless environments, transmission and reception costs dominate system power consumption, motivating research effort on new technologies capable of reducing the footprint of the radio, paving the way for the Internet of Things. The most important challenge is to reduce power consumption when receivers are idle, the so called idle-listening cost. One approach proposes switching off the main receiver, then introduces new wake-up circuitry capable of detecting an incoming transmission, optionally discriminating the packet destination using addressing, then switching on the main radio only when required. This wake-up receiver technology represents the ultimate frontier in low power radio communication. In this paper, we present a comprehensive literature review of the research progress in wake-up radio (WuR) hardware and relevant networking software. First, we present an overview of the WuR system architecture, including challenges to hardware design and a comparison of solutions presented throughout the last decade. Next, we present various medium access control and routing protocols as well as diverse ways to exploit WuRs, both as an extension of pre-existing systems and as a new concept to manage low-power networking.

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Ultra Low Power Wake-Up Radios: A Hardware and Networking Survey

This expanded and thoroughly revised edition of Thomas H. Lee's acclaimed guide to the design of gigahertz RF integrated circuits features a completely new chapter on the principles of wireless systems. The chapters on low-noise amplifiers, oscillators and phase noise have been significantly expanded as well. The chapter on architectures now contains several examples of complete chip designs that bring together all the various theoretical and practical elements involved in producing a prototype chip. First Edition Hb (1998): 0-521-63061-4 First Edition Pb (1998); 0-521-63922-0

The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits: RF CIRCUITS THROUGH THE AGES

Investigating factors influencing the physicians’ adoption of electronic health record (EHR) in healthcare system of Bangladesh: An empirical study

The health system of Bangladesh is haunted by challenges of accessibility and affordability. Despite impressive gains in many health indicators, recent evidence has raised concerns regarding the utilization, quality and equity of healthcare. In the context of new and unfamiliar public health challenges including high population density and rapid urbanization, eHealth and mHealth are being promoted as a route to cost-effective, equitable and quality healthcare in Bangladesh. The aim of this paper is to highlight such initiatives and understand their true potential. This scoping study applies a combination of research tools to explore 26 eHealth and mHealth initiatives in Bangladesh. A screening matrix was developed by modifying the framework of Arksey & O’Malley, further complemented by case study and SWOT analysis to identify common traits among the selected interventions. The WHO health system building blocks approach was then used for thematic analysis of these traits. Findings suggest that most eHealth and mHealth initiatives have proliferated within the private sector, using mobile phones. The most common initiatives include tele-consultation, prescription and referral. While a minority of projects have a monitoring and evaluation framework, less than a quarter have undertaken evaluation. Most of the initiatives use a health management information system (HMIS) to monitor implementation. However, these do not provide for effective sharing of information and interconnectedness among the various actors. There are extremely few individuals with eHealth training in Bangladesh and there is a strong demand for capacity building and experience sharing, especially for implementation and policy making. There is also a lack of research evidence on how to design interventions to meet the needs of the population and on potential benefits. This study concludes that Bangladesh needs considerable preparation and planning to sustain eHealth and mHealth initiatives successfully. Additional formative and operational research is essential to explore the true potential of the technology. Frameworks for regulation in regards to eHealth governance should be the aim of future research on the integration of eHealth and mHealth into the Bangladesh health system.

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eHealth and mHealth initiatives in Bangladesh: A scoping study

SUMMARY

Recently, the IEEE TG4k has been formed to amend the IEEE 802.15 family to address the low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks. The purpose is to facilitate point to multi-thousands of point communication to collect the scheduled and event data from a large number of nonmains powered endpoints that are widely dispersed. It should support low energy operation, which is necessary for multiyear battery life. Other major features are application data rate up to 40 Kb/s, thousands of endpoints per mains powered infrastructure, asymmetric application data flow, small and infrequent messages, tolerant to data latency, etc. In this paper, we present a discussion on low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks. We propose a medium access control protocol based on framed slotted aloha for these networks. We investigated probable packet sizes, energy consumptions, battery lifetime and the success rate for our protocol. The proposed protocol is simple to implement. Simulation results show that it is efficient in terms of packet success rate, energy consumption, and battery lifetime.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Framed slotted aloha based MAC protocol for low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks

The IEEE 802.15.4K Task Group was formed recently to address the low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks. The aim is to collect scheduled and event data from a large number of non-mains powered endpoints that are widely dispersed. The application requirements include reliable data transfer, energy efficiency, and long deployment lifetime. To meet the low energy critical infrastructure monitoring network requirements, we propose a multihop medium access control protocol where the scheduled or event data are routed to the coordinator through the cluster heads. The power consumption of the cluster heads is critical as they use more power than the normal endpoints. Our protocol uses the wake-up radio approach from cluster head to cluster head communication and an efficient guaranteed time slots allocation scheme to minimize the power consumption of the cluster heads. We derive analytical expressions for the average power consumption of cluster heads as well as ordinary endpoints. The results show that our proposed protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and SCP MAC in terms of power consumption. High power efficiency is achieved in both the cluster heads and normal endpoints. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Multi-hop medium access control protocol for low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks using wake-up radio

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is a short range wireless technology. As a revision to this standard, IEEE 802.15.4a introduces new options for PHY (physical layer) to enable ranging. In this paper, we investigate the theoretical maximum throughput and minimum delay of the un-slotted version of 802.15.4a using CSS (Chirp Spread Spectrum) PHY. The throughput and delay limits are derived for different frequency bands and data rates along with the formulae. Moreover, we calculate the bandwidth efficiency for both the standards. The comparative analysis concludes that the performance of 802.15.4a surpasses 802.15.4 in terms of throughput and delay.

Throughput, delay and bandwidth efficiency of IEEE 802.15.4a using CSS PHY

We investigate the maximum throughput and minimum delay for the unlostted version of the IEEE 802.15.4a using Ultra Wide Band (UWB). The throughput and delay limits are calculated for different data rates along with the formulae. UWB based 802.15.4a can achieve maximum throughput of 701 Kbps with a data rate of 851 Kbps.

Throughput limits of UWB based 802.15.4a

The Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) is one of the fledging paradigms that the next generation of wireless systems is sprouting towards. Among them, a more specific category is the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) used for health monitoring. On the other hand, Ultra-Wideband (UWB) comes with a number of desirable features at the physical layer for wireless communications. One big challenge in adoption of UWB in WBAN is the fact that signals get attenuated exponentially. Due to the intrinsic structural complexity in human body, electromagnetic waves show a profound variation during propagation through it. The reflection and transmission coefficients of human body are highly dependent upon the dielectric constants as well as upon the frequency. The difference in structural materials such as fat, muscles and blood essentially makes electromagnetic wave attenuation to be different along the way. Thus, a complete characterization of body channel is a challenging task. The connection between attenuation and frequency of the signal makes the investigation of UWB in WBAN an interesting proposition. In this paper, we study analytically the impact of body channels on electromagnetic signal propagation with reference to UWB. In the process, scattering, reflectivity and transmitivity have been addressed with analysis of approximate layer-wise modeling, and with numerical depictions. Pulses with Gaussian profile have been employed in our analysis. It shows that, under reasonable practical approximations, the human body channel can be modeled in layers so as to have the effects of total reflections or total transmissions in certain frequency bands. This could help decide such design issues as antenna characteristics of implant devices for WBAN employing UWB.

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M. Sanaullah Chowdhury

Papers

Framed slotted aloha based MAC protocol for low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks

Multi-hop medium access control protocol for low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks using wake-up radio

Throughput, delay and bandwidth efficiency of IEEE 802.15.4a using CSS PHY

Throughput limits of UWB based 802.15.4a

Studies of Scattering, Reflectivity, and Transmitivity in WBAN Channel: Feasibility of Using UWB