• ETRI Journal
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.571-580
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• 2024

A compact triple-band porous electromagnetic bandgap structure-loaded coplanar-waveguide-fed wearable antenna is introduced for applications of wireless body area networks. The porous structure is aimed to create a stopband or bandgap in the electromagnetic spectrum and increase breathability. The holes in the bottom electromagnetic bandgap surface increase the inductance, which in turn increases the bandwidth. The final design resonates at three bands with impedance bandwidths of 264 MHz, 100 MHz, and 153 MHz and maximum gains of 2.18 dBi, 6.75 dBi, and 9.50 dBi at 2.45 GHz, 3.5 GHz, and 5.5 GHz, respectively. In addition, measurements indicate that the proposed design can be deformed up to certain curvature and withstand human tissue loading. Moreover, the specific absorption rate remains within safe levels for humans. Therefore, the proposed antenna can suitably operate in the industrial, scientific, and medical, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and WiMAX bands for potential application to wireless body area networks.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.5218-5233
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• 2018

The coexisting wireless body area networks (WBAN) is a very challenging issue because of strong inter-networks interference, which seriously affects energy consumption and spectrum utilization ratio. In this paper, we study a power control strategy with nearest neighbor nodes distribution for coexisting WBAN based on stochastic geometry. Using homogeneous Poisson point processes (PPP) model, the relationship between the transmission power and the networks distribution is analytically derived to reduce interference to other devices. The goal of this paper is to increase the transmission success probability and throughput through power control strategy. In addition, we evaluate the area spectral efficiency simultaneously active WBAN in the same channel. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the power control algorithm.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.12B
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• pp.1329-1335
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a new medium access control protocol referred to as DCTW (Dual Channel Transmission Scheme for wireless body area networks). Wireless body area networks (WBANs) requires prioritization mechanism for life-critical data to transmit the data as early as possible. The proposed DCTW exploits a narrow band for transmitting life-critical data while it uses a broadband channel to transmit normal data. Since the narrow band is dedicated to life-critical data, the DCTW can effectively reduce the delay of life-critical data transmission. Through extensive simulation, we show the DCTW outperforms other existing schemes.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.419-427
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• 2015

There have been increases in the elderly population worldwide, and this has been accompanied by rapid growth in the health-care market, as there is an ongoing need to monitor the health of individuals. Wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of wireless sensors attached on or inside the human body to monitor vital health-related problems, e.g., electrocardiograms (ECGs), electroencephalograms (EEGs), and electronystagmograms (ENGs). With WBANs, patients' vital signs are recorded by each sensor and sent to a coordinator. However, because of obstructions by the human body, sensors cannot always send the data to the coordinator, requiring them to transmit at higher power. Therefore, we need to consider the lifetime of the sensors given their required transmit power. In the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, the transmission topology functions as a one-hop star plus one topology. In order to obtain a high throughput, we reduce the transmit power of the sensors and maintain equity for all sensors. We propose the multiple-hop transmission for WBANs based on the IEEE 802.15.6 carrier-sense multiple-access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. We calculate the throughput and variance of the transmit power by performing simulations, and we discuss the results obtained using the proposed theorems.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.980-997
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• 2013

Nowadays, wireless communication has a great advantage in technology. We use wireless devices almost in all expected life such as: entertainment, working and recently in the healthcare area, where Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) become a hot topic for researchers and system designers. Recent work on WBANs focus on related issues to communication protocol, especially ZigBee network is fine tuned to meet particular requirements in healthcare area. For example, some papers present real-time patient monitoring via ZigBee communication given the short distance between body sensors and remote devices, while the other work solve the limited coverage problem of Zigbee by designing mechanisms to relay Zigbee data to other types of wire or wireless infrastructure. However, very few of them investigate the scenarios of ZigBee coexisting or integrated with other networks. In this paper, we present the real-time data transmission from ZigBee end devices to Wide Area Network (WAN), Worldwide interoperation for microwave access network (WiMAX) and Long Term Evolution network (LTE). We provide in detail the ZigBee gateway components. Our simulation is conducted by OPNET, we visualize many topology network scenarios in ZigBee hybrid system. The results in simulation show that ZigBee end devices can successfully transmit data in real-time to other network end devices.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.36-42
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• 2022

This study presents an analysis of the human body channel as an electric signal path using body impulse response (BIR). The human body communications (HBC) has recently emerged as an effective signal transmission method to create wireless body area networks (WBAN). We provide body channel characteristics based on measured BIR in a proper experimental environment for the HBC using capacitive coupling with a customized channel sounding device, which can be applied as a guideline for the HBC system design. The frequency response of the BIR, extracted by a customized signal processing for the measure signals, shows the channel path loss (CPS) between 0 MHz and 100 MHz with an average CPS of approximately 46.8 dB. In addition, the relative noise power distributions can provide estimations on the signal to noise ratio at the HBC receiver in terms of capacitor and resistor values in the measured frequency band and the frequency band lower than 3 MHz considering the baseband signal detection.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.8
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• pp.1805-1824
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• 2013

Recently, the use of wireless body area networks (WBAN) has been increasing rapidly in medical healthcare applications. WBANs consist of smart nodes that can be used to sense and transmit vital data such as heart rate, temperature and ECG from a human body to a medical centre. WBANs depend on limited resources such as energy and bandwidth. In order to utilise these resources efficiently, a very well organized medium access control (MAC) protocol must be considered. In this paper, a new, adaptive and energy-efficient MAC protocol, entitled isMAC, is proposed for WBANs. The proposed MAC is based on multi-channel communication and aims to prolong the network lifetime by effectively employing (i) a collision prevention mechanism, (ii) a coordinator node (WCN) selection algorithm and (iii) a transmission power adjustment approach. The isMAC protocol has been developed and modelled, by using OPNET Modeler simulation software. It is based on a networking scenario that requires especially high data rates such as ECG, for performance evaluation purposes. Packet delay, network throughput and energy consumption have been chosen as performance metrics. The comparison between the simulation results of isMAC and classical IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) protocol shows that isMAC significantly outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of packet delay, throughput and energy consumption.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.142-148
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• 2011

Because currently available wireless technologies are not appropriate for wireless body area networks (WBANs), the IEEE 802.15.6 standard was introduced by the IEEE 802.15.6 Task Group to satisfy all the requirements for a monitoring system that operates on, in, or around the human body. In this work, we develop an analytical model for evaluating the performance of an IEEE 802.15.6-based WBAN under saturation condition and a noisy channel. We employ a three-dimensional Markov chain to model the backoff procedure as specified in the standard. Probability generating functions (PGFs) are used to compute the performance descriptors of the network. The results obtained from the analytical model are validated by simulation results. Our results indicate that under saturation condition, the medium is accessed by the highest user priority nodes at the vast majority of time while the other nodes are starving.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.127-134
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• 2016

WBSN (Wireless Body Sensor Network), also called WBAN (Wireless Body Area Networks) generally, is a kind of WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) applications, which is composed of the various sensor nodes residing in human body embodied or in wearable way. The measured data at each sensor node in WBSN requires being synchronized at sink node for exact analysis for status of human body, which is like WSN. Although many time synchronization protocols for WSN has been already developed, they are not appropriate to WBSN. In this paper, a new time synchronization protocol for WBSN considering the characteristics of WBSN is proposed. The proposed scheme is not only simple, but also consumes less power, leading to increasing network life time. We will show that the proposed scheme is appropriate to WBSN by evaluating its performance by simulation.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.1733-1751
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• 2015

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard not only provides a maximum of seven guaranteed time slots (GTSs) for allocation within a superframe to support time-critical traffic, but also achieves ultralow complexity, cost, and power in low-rate and short-distance wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Real-time wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs), as a special purpose WPAN, can perfectly use the IEEE 802. 15. 4 standard for its wireless connection. In this paper, we propose an adaptive GTS allocation scheme for real-time WBASN data transmissions with different priorities in consideration of low latency, fairness, and bandwidth utilization. The proposed GTS allocation scheme combines a weight-based priority assignment algorithm with an innovative starvation avoidance scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing GTS implementation for the traditional IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of average delay, contention free period bandwidth utilization, and fairness.