Current progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to a base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments.

A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks for eHealthcare Systems in Residential Environments

We consider a noise-limited wireless sensor network that consists of battery-operated nodes which can route information to a mobile sink in a multi-hop fashion. The problem of maximizing the network's lifetime, defined as the period of time during which the network can route a feasible flow to each sink location subject to power/energy constraints, is cast into a linear program, reduced into a simpler equivalent form and solved via dual decomposition. The unknowns are the sink sojourn times and the routing flow vector for each sink location. The presence of a mobile sink presents new challenges but the problem structure can still be exploited to find the optimal solution. A distributed algorithm based on the subgradient method and using the sink as leader is proposed and its performance is evaluated through simulation for random networks. The algorithm's requirements in memory are also provided.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5757977/5757978/05758168.pdf

A Distributed Algorithm for Maximum Lifetime Routing in Sensor Networks with Mobile Sink

The integration of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and cooperative relay (CoR) techniques has evolved as a new phenomenon for the next-generation wireless communication system. CoR is used to get energy and spectral efficient network and to solve the issues of fading, path loss, shadowing, and smaller coverage area. Relay nodes are battery-constrained or battery-less devices. They need some charging systems externally as replacing or recharging of their batteries sometimes which are not feasible and convenient. Energy harvesting (EH) is the most cost-effective, suitable, and safer solutions to power up these relays. Among various types of the EH, SWIPT is the most prominent technique as it provides spectral efficiency by delivering energy and information to the relays at the same time. This paper reviews the combination of CoR and SWIPT. From basic to advanced architectures, applications and taxonomies of CoR and SWIPT are presented, various forms of resource allocation and relay selection algorithms are covered. The usage of CoR and SWIPT in the fifth-generation wireless networks is discussed. This paper focuses on the integral aspects of the CoR and SWIPT to other next-generation wireless communication systems and techniques such as multiple-input-multiple-output, wireless sensor network, cognitive radio, vehicular ad hoc network, non-orthogonal multiple access, beamforming technique, and the Internet of Things. Some open issues and future directions and challenges are given in this paper.

/pdf/a-survey-on-simultaneous-wireless-information-and-power-3qs19eqjr7.pdf

A Survey on Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer With Cooperative Relay and Future Challenges

Co-LAEEBA

The increase in average lifespan and huge costs for health treatments have resulted in cost effective solutions for healthcare management. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a promising technology for delivering quality healthcare to its users. Low power devices attached to the body have limited battery life. It is desirable to have energy efficient routing protocols that maintain the required reliability value for sending the data from a given node to the sink. The current work proposes two protocols: Optimized Cost Effective and Energy Efficient Routing protocol (OCER) and Extended-OCER (E-OCER). In OCER, optimization using Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied to the multi-objective cost function with residual energy, link reliability and path loss as its parameters for selecting the most optimal route from a given body coordinator to the sink. Distance between any two sensor nodes is reduced by applying multi-hop approach. E-OCER extends the work of OCER by considering inter-BAN communication. Performance of OCER is compared with other existing energy aware routing protocols by considering different parameters. A comparison of the performance of E-OCER with OCER is made to study the effect of on-body sensors communication on the energy consumption and throughput of the network. This paper also provides a comprehensive energy model to calculate the total energy consumption of the network. In addition to the radio transmission and receiving energy, other basic energy consumption sources viz. processing energy, sensor sensing, transient energy and transmission/reception on/off energy have also been taken into account. The results show an improved performance of the proposed protocols in terms of energy efficiency.

Optimized cost effective and energy efficient routing protocol for wireless body area networks

In this study, we analyse incremental cooperative communication for wireless body area networks (WBANs) with different numbers of relays. Energy efficiency (EE) and the packet error rate (PER) are investigated for different schemes. We propose a new cooperative communication scheme with three-stage relaying and compare it to existing schemes. Our proposed scheme provides reliable communication with less PER at the cost of surplus energy consumption. Analytical expressions for the EE of the proposed three-stage cooperative communication scheme are also derived, taking into account the effect of PER. Later on, the proposed three-stage incremental cooperation is implemented in a network layer protocol; enhanced incremental cooperative critical data transmission in emergencies for static WBANs (EInCo-CEStat). Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the proposed scheme. Results of incremental relay-based cooperative communication protocols are compared to two existing cooperative routing protocols: cooperative critical data transmission in emergencies for static WBANs (Co-CEStat) and InCo-CEStat. It is observed from the simulation results that incremental relay-based cooperation is more energy efficient than the existing conventional cooperation protocol, Co-CEStat. The results also reveal that EInCo-CEStat proves to be more reliable with less PER and higher throughput than both of the counterpart protocols. However, InCo-CEStat has less throughput with a greater stability period and network lifetime. Due to the availability of more redundant links, EInCo-CEStat achieves a reduced packet drop rate at the cost of increased energy consumption.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/16/3/284/pdf

Towards Reliable and Energy-Efficient Incremental Cooperative Communication for Wireless Body Area Networks

Energy efficient and reliable communication is extremely crucial in most of the applications of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). Communication between sensor nodes is the major energy guzzler that limits the network lifetime and hence, disrupt WBAN's operation. Moreover, unreliability in wireless communication caused by the channel impairments, such as shadowing and fading, further exacerbate the situation. This paper presents a new three-stage cooperative relaying scheme which proves to be energy efficient and reliable for WBANs. Analytical expressions for the Energy Efficiency (EE) and Packet Error Rate (PER) are also derived in this study.

Incremental Relay Based Cooperative Communication in Wireless Body Area Networks

Cooperative routing is a promising technique which exploits the broadcast nature of wireless medium to enhance network performance Sensor nodes simultaneously transmit their data on different links and utilize cooperation between nodes In this paper, a new protocol, Co-CEStat, Cooperative Critical data transmission in Emergency for Static Wireless Body Area Networks, is proposed The protocol utilizes the merits of both direct and cooperative transmission to achieve higher stability period and end-to-end throughput with greater network lifetime Simulations are conducted in MATLAB to compare the Co-CEStat's performance with that of three other contemporary non-cooperative routing protocols

Co-CEStat: Cooperative Critical Data Transmission in Emergency in Static Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are playing promising role in healthcare field by allowing remote monitoring of patients. In such networks, designing a energy efficient routing topology is of main concern. For this purpose, we propose CEMob, Critical data transmission in Emergency with Mobility support in WBANs, as a routing layer protocol. CEMob avoid continuous transmission of information, thereby, preserving nodes' energy. Simulation results of CEMob are compared with that of contemporary routing protocols i.e. ATTEMPT and REATTEMPT. Comparison justify that CEMob has reduced energy consumption and is more efficient than the compared protocols.

S. Yousaf

Papers

Co-LAEEBA

Towards Reliable and Energy-Efficient Incremental Cooperative Communication for Wireless Body Area Networks

Incremental Relay Based Cooperative Communication in Wireless Body Area Networks

Co-CEStat: Cooperative Critical Data Transmission in Emergency in Static Wireless Body Area Network

CEMob: Critical Data Transmission in Emergency with Mobility Support in WBANs