• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.1074-1084
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• 2016

This paper presents a transmission method for improving human body communications in terms of spectral efficiency, and the performances of bit-error-rate (BER) and frame synchronization, with a highly simplified structure. Compared to the conventional frequency selective digital transmission supporting IEEE standard 802.15.6 for wireless body area networks, the proposed scheme improves the spectral efficiency from 0.25 bps/Hz to 1 bps/Hz based on the 3-dB bandwidth of the transmit spectral mask, and the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) by 0.51 dB at a BER of $10^{-6}$ with an 87.5% reduction in the detection complexity of the length of the Hamming distance computation. The proposed preamble structure using its customized detection algorithm achieves perfect frame synchronization at the SNR of a BER of $10^{-6}$ by applying the proposed pre-processing to compensate for the distortions on the preamble signals due to the band-limit effects by transmit and receive filters.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1087-1095
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• 2014

A recent major development in computer technology is the advent of the wearable computer system that is based on human-centric interface technology trends and ubiquitous computing environments. Wearable computer systems can use the wireless universal serial bus (WUSB) that refers to USB technology that is merged with WiMedia PHY/MAC technical specifications. In this paper, we focus on an integrated system of the wireless USB over the IEEE 802.15.6 wireless body area networks (WBAN) for wireless wearable computer systems supporting U-health services. And a communication structure that can differentiate QoS of U-health WBAN and WUSB traffic with different priorities is proposed for WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6 hierarchical protocol. In our proposal and performance evaluation, throughputs of U-health WBAN and WUSB traffic are analyzed under single and multiple QoS classes to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed QoS differentiating structure in WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.839-847
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• 2014

A recent major development in computer technology is the advent of the wearable computer system that is based on human-centric interface technology trends and ubiquitous computing environments. Wearable computer systems can use the wireless universal serial bus (WUSB) that refers to USB technology that is merged with WiMedia PHY/MAC technical specifications. In this paper, we focus on an integrated system of the wireless USB over the wireless body area networks (WBAN) for wireless wearable computer systems supporting U-health services. To construct the WUSB over WBAN communication systems, we propose a WBAN beaconing structure to assign WUSB communication periods. In the proposed structure, WUSB uses private periods of WBAN. In our performance evaluations, we compare theoretical results and simulation results about throughputs of WUSB under various WBAN channel occupations to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed structure in WUSB over WBAN communications.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.1619-1627
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• 2014

Wearable computer systems can use the wireless universal serial bus (WUSB) that refers to USB technology that is merged with WiMedia PHY/MAC technical specifications. In this paper, we focus on an integrated system of the wireless USB over the IEEE 802.15.6 wireless body area networks (WBAN) for wireless wearable computer systems supporting U-health services. And a communication structure that performs the time-synchronization is proposed for WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6 hierarchical protocol. Proposed time-synchronization mechanisms adopt the WBAN Polling Access and combine it with a time-synchronization middleware using time stamps. In our performance evaluations, time-synchronization performances with only WBAN Polling Access scheme are analyzed first. After that, performances combined with the time-synchronization middleware are analyzed to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed time-synchronization structure in WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.1610-1618
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• 2014

Wearable computer systems can use the wireless universal serial bus (WUSB) that refers to USB technology that is merged with WiMedia PHY/MAC technical specifications. In this paper, we focus on an integrated system of the wireless USB over the IEEE 802.15.6 wireless body area networks (WBAN) for wireless wearable computer systems supporting U-health services. And a communication structure that performs the hibernation for low power consumption is proposed for WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6 hierarchical protocol. In the proposed hibernation mechanisms, WUSB communications are permitted at each m-periodic inactive periods of WBAN superframes by using the WBAN information of Wakeup Period and Wakeup Phase message fields. In our performance evaluations, performances according to amount of WUSB traffic and Wakeup Periods are analyzed respectively to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed hibernation structure in WUSB over IEEE 802.15.6.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.221-237
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• 2016

The wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of wearable computing devices and can support various healthcare-related applications. There exist two crucial issues when WBANs are utilized for healthcare applications. One is the protection of the sensitive biometric data transmitted over the insecure wireless channels. The other is the design of effective medical management mechanisms. In this paper, a secure medical information management system is proposed and implemented on a TinyOS-based WBAN test bed to simultaneously address these two issues. In this system, the electronic medical record (EMR) is bound to the biometric data with a novel fragile zero-watermarking scheme based on the modified visual secret sharing (MVSS). In this manner, the EMR can be utilized not only for medical management but also for data integrity checking. Additionally, both the biometric data and the EMR are encrypted, and the EMR is further protected by the MVSS. Our analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system not only protects the confidentialities of both the biometric data and the EMR but also offers reliable patient information authentication, explicit healthcare operation verification and undeniable doctor liability identification for WBANs.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.104-108
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• 2014

The field of body sensor networks has attracted interest of many researchers due to its potential to revolutionize medicine. These sensors are usually implanted inside the human body and communicate among themselves. In the process of receiving, processing, or transmitting data, these devices produce heat. This heat damages the tissues surrounding the devices in the case of prolonged exposure. In this paper, to reduce this damages, we have improved and evaluated two protocols-the least temperature routing protocol and adaptive least temperature routing protocol-by implementing clustering as well as a leadership rotation algorithm. We used Castalia to simulate a basic body area network cluster composed of 6 nodes. A throughput application was used to simulate all the nodes sending data to one sink node. Simulations results shows that improved communication protocol with leadership rotation algorithm significantly reduce the energy consumption as compared to a scheme without leadership rotation algorithm.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.14-18
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• 2014

A recent major development in computer technology is the advent of wearable computer systems. Wearable computer systems employ a wireless universal serial bus (WUSB), which refers to a combination of USB with the WiMedia wireless technical specifications. In this study, we focus on an integrated system of WUSB over wireless body area networks (WBANs) for wireless wearable computer systems. However, current WBAN MACs do not have well-defined quality of service (QoS) mapping and resource allocation mechanisms to support multimedia streams with the requested QoS parameters. To solve this problem, we propose a novel QoS-aware time slot allocation method. The proposed method provides fair and adaptive QoS provisioning to isochronous streams according to current traffic loads and their requested QoS parameters by executing a QoS satisfaction algorithm at the WUSB/WBAN host. The simulation results show that the proposed method improves the efficiency of time slot utilization while maximizing QoS provisioning.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.879-884
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• 2012

In this Paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Time Synchronization technique based on WUSB (Wireless USB) over WBAN (Wireless Body Area Networks) protocol required for Wearable Computer systems. For this purpose, the proposed Time Synchronization algorithm minimizes power consumption and estimates time information with accuracy. It is executed on the basis of WUSB over WBAN protocol at each sensor node comprising peripherals of a wearable computer system. It minimizes power consumption by exchanging time stamp packets and forming a hierarchical structure.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.4188-4206
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• 2016

Power control is widely used to reduce co-channel interference in wireless networks and guarantee the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of ongoing connections. This technique is also effective for wireless body area networks (WBANs). Although achieving satisfactory SINR is important for WBAN users, they may not be willing to achieve it at arbitrarily high power levels since power is a scarce resource in WBANs. Besides, for WBANs with different purposes, the QoS requirements and concern about the power consumption may be different. This motivates us to formulate the power control problem using the concepts from microeconomics and game theory. In this paper, the QoS objective is viewed as a utility function, which represents the degree of user satisfaction, while the power consumption is viewed as a cost function. The power control problem consequently becomes a non-cooperative multiplayer game, in which each player tries to maximize its net utility, i.e., the utility minus the cost. Within this framework, we investigate the Nash equilibrium existence and uniqueness in the game and derive the best response solution to reach the Nash equilibrium. To obtain the optimal transmission power in a distributed way, we further propose a utility-based and QoS-aware power control algorithm (UQoS-PCA). Tunable cost coefficient in UQoS-PCA enables this scheme to be flexible to satisfy diverse service requirements. Simulation results show the convergence and effectiveness of the proposed scheme as well as improvements over existing algorithm.