• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.23 no.7
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• pp.219-230
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• 2023

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have made it easier for healthcare workers and patients to monitor patients' status continuously in real time. WBANs have complex and diverse network structures; thus, management and control can be challenging. Therefore, considering emerging Software-defined networks (SDN) with WBANs is a promising technology since SDN implements a new network management and design approach. The SDN concept is used in this study to create more adaptable and dynamic network architectures for WBANs. The study focuses on comparing the performance of two SDN controllers, POX and Ryu, using Mininet, an open-source simulation tool, to construct network topologies. The performance of the controllers is evaluated based on bandwidth, throughput, and round-trip time metrics for networks using an OpenFlow switch with sixteen nodes and a controller for each topology. The study finds that the choice of network controller can significantly impact network performance and suggests that monitoring network performance indicators is crucial for optimizing network performance. The project provides valuable insights into the performance of SDN-based WBANs using POX and Ryu controllers and highlights the importance of selecting the appropriate network controller for a given network architecture.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.452-464
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• 2019

The use of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in healthcare applications has made it convenient to monitor both health personnel and patient status continuously in real time through wearable wireless sensor nodes. However, the heterogeneous and complex network structure of WBANs has some disadvantages in terms of control and management. The software-defined network (SDN) approach is a promising technology that defines a new design and management approach for network communications. In order to create more flexible and dynamic network structures in WBANs, this study uses the SDN approach. For this, a WBAN architecture based on the SDN approach with a new energy-aware routing algorithm for healthcare architecture is proposed. To develop a more flexible architecture, a controller that manages all HUBs is designed. The proposed architecture is modeled using the Riverbed Modeler software for performance analysis. The simulation results show that the SDN-based structure meets the service quality requirements and shows superior performance in terms of energy consumption, throughput, successful transmission rate, and delay parameters according to the traditional routing approach.

• 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.

• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1052-1070
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• 2016

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have received a lot of attention as a promising technology for medical and healthcare applications. A WBAN should guarantee energy efficiency, data reliability, and low data latency because it uses tiny sensors that have limited energy and deals with medical data that needs to be timely and correctly transferred. To satisfy this requirement, many multi-radio multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed, but these cannot be implemented on current off-the-shelf sensor nodes because they do not support multi-radio transceivers. Thus, recently single-radio multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed; however, these methods are energy inefficient due to data duplication. This paper proposes a TDMA-based single-radio, multi-channel MAC protocol that uses the Unbalanced Star+Mesh topology to satisfy the requirements of WBANs. Our analytical analysis together experiments using real sensor nodes show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing methods in terms of energy efficiency, reliability, and low data latency.

• 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.6 no.9
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• pp.2302-2322
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• 2012

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are introduced as an enabling technology in tele-health for patient monitoring. Designing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the main challenge in WBANs because of their various applications and strict requirements such as low level of energy consumption, low transmission delay, the wide range of data rates and prioritizing emergency data. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol to provide different requirements of WBANs targeted for medical applications. The proposed MAC provides an efficient emergency response mechanism by considering the correlation between medical signals. It also reduces the power consumption of nodes by minimizing contention access, reducing the probability of the collision and using an efficient synchronization algorithm. In addition, the proposed MAC protocol increases the data rate of the nodes by allocating the resources according to the condition of the network. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol in terms of power consumption level as well as the average response delay. Also, the comparison results of the proposed MAC with IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol show a tradeoff between average response delay and medical data rate.

• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.5800-5818
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• 2018

Interference may occur when several co-located wireless body area networks (WBANs) share the same channel simultaneously, which is compressed by resource scheduling generally. In this paper, a QoS-aware Adaptive Coloring (QAC) scheduling algorithm is proposed, which contains two components: interference sets determination and time slots assignment. The highlight of QAC is to determine the interference graph based on the relay scheme and adapted to the network QoS by multi-coloring approach. However, the frequent resource assignment brings in extra energy consumption and packet loss. Thus we come up with a launch condition for the QAC scheduling algorithm, that is if the interference duration is longer than a threshold predetermined, time slots rescheduling is activated. Furthermore, based on the relative distance and moving speed between WBANs, a prediction model for interference duration is proposed. The simulation results show that compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, the QAC scheduling algorithm has better performance in terms of network capacity, average delay and resource utility.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.1108-1130
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• 2013

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are becoming increasingly important to solve the issue of health care. IEEE 802.15.6 is a wireless communication standard for WBANs, aiming to provide a real-time and continuous monitoring. In this paper, we present our development of a modified Markov Chain model and a backoff model, in which most features such as user priorities, contention windows, modulation and coding schemes (MCSs), and frozen states are taken into account. Then we calculate the normalized throughput and average access delay of IEEE 802.15.6 networks under saturation and ideal channel conditions. We make an evaluation of network performances by comparing with IEEE 802.15.4 and the results validate that IEEE 802.15.6 networks can provide high quality of service (QoS) for nodes with high priorities.