Recent developments and technological advancements in wireless communication, MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) technology and integrated circuits has enabled low-power, intelligent, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive micro and nano-technology sensor nodes strategically placed in or around the human body to be used in various applications, such as personal health monitoring. This exciting new area of research is called Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and leverages the emerging IEEE 802.15.6 and IEEE 802.15.4j standards, specifically standardized for medical WBANs. The aim of WBANs is to simplify and improve speed, accuracy, and reliability of communication of sensors/actuators within, on, and in the immediate proximity of a human body. The vast scope of challenges associated with WBANs has led to numerous publications. In this paper, we survey the current state-of-art of WBANs based on the latest standards and publications. Open issues and challenges within each area are also explored as a source of inspiration towards future developments in WBANs.

Wireless Body Area Networks: A Survey

With the application of Internet of Things and services to manufacturing, the fourth stage of industrialization, referred to as Industrie 4.0, is believed to be approaching. For Industrie 4.0 to come true, it is essential to implement the horizontal integration of inter-corporation value network, the end-to-end integration of engineering value chain, and the vertical integration of factory inside. In this paper, we focus on the vertical integration to implement flexible and reconfigurable smart factory. We first propose a brief framework that incorporates industrial wireless networks, cloud, and fixed or mobile terminals with smart artifacts such as machines, products, and conveyors. Then, we elaborate the operational mechanism from the perspective of control engineering, that is, the smart artifacts form a self-organized system which is assisted with the feedback and coordination blocks that are implemented on the cloud and based on the big data analytics. In addition, we outline the main technical features and beneficial outcomes and present a detailed design scheme. We conclude that the smart factory of Industrie 4.0 is achievable by extensively applying the existing enabling technologies while actively coping with the technical challenges.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2016/3159805

Implementing smart factory of Industrie 4.0: an outlook

The increasing use of wireless networks and the constant miniaturization of electrical devices has empowered the development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In these networks various sensors are attached on clothing or on the body or even implanted under the skin. The wireless nature of the network and the wide variety of sensors offer numerous new, practical and innovative applications to improve health care and the Quality of Life. The sensors of a WBAN measure for example the heartbeat, the body temperature or record a prolonged electrocardiogram. Using a WBAN, the patient experiences a greater physical mobility and is no longer compelled to stay in the hospital. This paper offers a survey of the concept of Wireless Body Area Networks. First, we focus on some applications with special interest in patient monitoring. Then the communication in a WBAN and its positioning between the different technologies is discussed. An overview of the current research on the physical layer, existing MAC and network protocols is given. Further, cross layer and quality of service is discussed. As WBANs are placed on the human body and often transport private data, security is also considered. An overview of current and past projects is given. Finally, the open research issues and challenges are pointed out.

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A survey on wireless body area networks

Internet of Things (IoT) is playing a more and more important role after its showing up, it covers from traditional equipment to general household objects such as WSNs and RFID. With the great potential of IoT, there come all kinds of challenges. This paper focuses on the security problems among all other challenges. As IoT is built on the basis of the Internet, security problems of the Internet will also show up in IoT. And as IoT contains three layers: perception layer, transportation layer and application layer, this paper will analyze the security problems of each layer separately and try to find new problems and solutions. This paper also analyzes the cross-layer heterogeneous integration issues and security issues in detail and discusses the security issues of IoT as a whole and tries to find solutions to them. In the end, this paper compares security issues between IoT and traditional network, and discusses opening security issues of IoT.

https://csi.dgist.ac.kr/uploads/Seminar/1407_IoT_SSH.pdf

Security of the Internet of Things: perspectives and challenges

The distributed nature and dynamic topology of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) introduces very special requirements in routing protocols that should be met. The most important feature of a routing protocol, in order to be efficient for WSNs, is the energy consumption and the extension of the network's lifetime. During the recent years, many energy efficient routing protocols have been proposed for WSNs. In this paper, energy efficient routing protocols are classified into four main schemes: Network Structure, Communication Model, Topology Based and Reliable Routing. The routing protocols belonging to the first category can be further classified as flat or hierarchical. The routing protocols belonging to the second category can be further classified as Query-based or Coherent and non-coherent-based or Negotiation-based. The routing protocols belonging to the third category can be further classified as Location-based or Mobile Agent-based. The routing protocols belonging to the fourth category can be further classified as QoS-based or Multipath-based. Then, an analytical survey on energy efficient routing protocols for WSNs is provided. In this paper, the classification initially proposed by Al-Karaki, is expanded, in order to enhance all the proposed papers since 2004 and to better describe which issues/operations in each protocol illustrate/enhance the energy-efficiency issues.

Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Advances in wireless communication technologies, such as wearable and implantable biosensors, along with recent developments in the embedded computing area are enabling the design, development, and implementation of body area networks. This class of networks is paving the way for the deployment of innovative healthcare monitoring applications. In the past few years, much of the research in the area of body area networks has focused on issues related to wireless sensor designs, sensor miniaturization, low-power sensor circuitry, signal processing, and communications protocols. In this paper, we present an overview of body area networks, and a discussion of BAN communications types and their related issues. We provide a detailed investigation of sensor devices, physical layer, data link layer, and radio technology aspects of BAN research. We also present a taxonomy of BAN projects that have been introduced/proposed to date. Finally, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make BANs truly ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.

Body Area Networks: A Survey

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) networks as an efficient means for providing automated communications among distributed devices. Automated M2M communications can offset the overhead costs of conventional operations, thus promoting their wider adoption in fixed and mobile platforms equipped with embedded processors and sensors/actuators. In this paper, we survey M2M technologies for applications such as healthcare, energy management and entertainment. In particular, we examine the typical architectures of home M2M networks and discuss the performance tradeoffs in existing designs. Our investigation covers quality of service, energy efficiency and security issues. Moreover, we review existing home networking projects to better understand the real-world applicability of these systems. This survey contributes to better understanding of the challenges in existing M2M networks and further shed new light on future research directions.

A Survey of Recent Developments in Home M2M Networks

Recently, research interest has increased in the design, development, and deployment of mobile agent systems for high-level inference and surveillance in a wireless sensor network (WSN). Mobile agent systems employ migrating codes to facilitate flexible application re-tasking, local processing, and collaborative signal and information processing. This provides extra flexibility, as well as new capabilities to WSNs in contrast to the conventional WSN operations based on the client-server computing model. In this article we survey the potential applications of mobile agents in WSNs and discuss the key design issues for such applications. We decompose the agent design functionality into four components, that is, architecture, itinerary planning, middleware system design, and agent cooperation. This taxonomy covers low-level to high-level design issues and facilitates the creation of a component-based and efficient mobile agent system for a wide range of applications. With a different realization for each design component, it is expected that flexible trade-offs (e.g., between energy and delay) can be achieved according to specific application requirements.

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Applications and design issues for mobile agents in wireless sensor networks

Radio frequency identification technology has received an increasing amount of attention in the past few years as an important emerging technology. However, the intrinsically passive features of existing RFID systems, to which we refer as first-generation RFID systems, render their adaptation to real-world dynamics in order to efficiently comply with up-to-date application-specific requirements difficult. To address this challenging issue, we propose an evolution to second-generation RFID systems characterized by the introduction of encoded rules that are dynamically stored in RFID tags. This novel approach facilitates the systems? operation to perform actions on demand for different objects in different situations, and enables improved scalability. Based on 2G-RFID-Sys, we propose a novel e-healthcare management system, and explain how it can be employed to leverage the effectiveness of existing ones. It is foreseeable that the flexibility and scalability of 2G-RFID-Sys will support more automatic and intelligent applications in the future.

/pdf/a-2g-rfid-based-e-healthcare-system-6kq5rcpuae.pdf

A 2G-RFID-based e-healthcare system

Radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology could play a vital role in future smart-environment applications. This code-centric RFID system uses software-agent based intelligence to achieve faster service responses.

/pdf/code-centric-rfid-system-based-on-software-agent-41l1jya446.pdf

Sergio Gonzalez

Papers

Body Area Networks: A Survey

A Survey of Recent Developments in Home M2M Networks

Applications and design issues for mobile agents in wireless sensor networks

A 2G-RFID-based e-healthcare system

Code-Centric RFID System Based on Software Agent Intelligence