Power harvesting, dynamic and reliable green wireless

body area networks for health care applications

Context
Pervasive Intelligence is a world where environment becomes context-aware, smart
and responsive to any type of human needs. In such a world, networking and
computing technology coexist with people in a pervasive and friendly. Various
interconnected smart devices interact with each other seamlessly and create a new
intelligence. For medical applications, this translates into proliferation of remote
telemedicine and monitoring; and all efforts are conducted to concentrates on
advances in green wireless to support medical and wellness needs.
Particularly the power harvesting technologies in Green Wireless Body Area Network
(Green WBAN) for health care application.
Related work
Recent technological advances in integrated circuits, wireless communications, and
physiological sensing allow miniature, lightweight, ultra-low power, intelligent
monitoring devices. A number of these devices can be integrated into a Wireless Body
Area Network (WBAN) to health care. Thus, a WBAN is regarded as a promising
interdisciplinary technology that could have a great impact on advancing health care
technology. Effectively in health care area, a WBAN will guarantee a continuous and
personalized monitoring capability which is beneficial for medical staff to diagnostic
diseases as well as to take pro-active decisions in regard of emergency situations. In
an ambulatory monitoring application a WBAN consists of a set of low-power biosensors that are located on, in or around the patient body to gather physiological
signals and send resulting data toward a nearby monitoring device or nurse station
[1]-[2].
Since WBAN minimizes the number of wires and monitoring devices around the
human body it improves the quality of life of who has to use it for medical
requirements. Nevertheless, in comparison to traditional wireless sensor and ad hoc
networks, WBANs present several additional and new research challenges due to
signal propagation characteristics of in and around a human body and need for safe,
and dependable operation with ability to operate for long duration. Effectively, for
instance bio-sensors are wearable or an implanted into the human body, low
transmission power is very desirable in order to mitigate interferences and minimize
the harmful health effects associated with the radio frequency emissions.
In fact, since a high energy wave may heat and damage the body tissue by energy
absorption [3], sensors cannot use communication channel with higher radio power
frequency. Therefore, the only alternative solution that can guarantee the delivery of data
from far away sensor nodes toward sink is the usage of nearby relays. Adding these
relaying nodes, a WBAN will guarantee more reliability as potentially more than one path
could be set for each sensor node to the sink. Authors in [4] concluded that relay
communication mode within a WBAN turns out the most reliable and data delivery
strategy. Relaying nodes based-communication architecture is energy-efficient as using of
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a relaying structure improves energy consumption largely; effectively this distributes the
routing load over the entire network.
For WBAN, reliability and efficient resource management is not only important to
increase its life time but is also important as it is dealing with medical data critical to
health of patient. One of main problem that faces WBAN operator is the intra-WBAN
interference which results mainly from the fact that each bio-sensor collects a
different parameter with different data rate in different alternation. Another source of
intra-WBAN interferences is related to the regular movements of patient in his
environment. Indeed, in a motion such as walking, the body limbs move continuously
which results that the positions of the sensor nodes connected to them change related
to each other. Therefore, the decrease in the internodes distance may induce intrainterferences in case of a non-adapted transmission powers in bio-sensing nodes. In
literature few works have been considered intra-WBAN interference problem
[5][6][7][8].

More over, duty cycling has recently attracted considerable attention [13] [14]
due to its paramount importance on energy conservation in Wireless Body
Area Networks (WBANs). However, the existing protocols cannot operate
effectively under concurrent traffic especially in the health monitoring
applications. To bridge this gap, we present a novel two-phase receiverinitiated MAC protocol for Concurrent traffic based on asynchronous duty
cycling, called C-MAC. Technically, C-MAC designs an orderingbased
communication algorithm to effectively avoid collisions. Moreover, C-MAC
enables nodes to switch to Standby Mode (SBM) to avoid idle listening and
overhearing.

To overcome the aforementioned drawbacks of multiplexing techniques, one

alternative solution could be the usage of power control mechanism proposed in
literature [9][10] to solve inter-WBANs interferences and duty cycling. However,
relaying on power control technique is challenging problem especially in fast
changing scenarios where sensor nodes positions are varying within the WBAN due to
the mobility of the body [11][12].

Research Work
As aforementioned Green WBAN will be a principal component in the pervasive
healthcare system, which is to provide healthcare anywhere and at anytime. It is very
important to support the large-scale application of Green WBAN. However, many
research groups work on an international standard on WBAN and focus their efforts
only on early deployment of WBAN. It is judicious to support in particular other axes.
An extremely low transmit power per node is needed to minimize interference and to
cope with health concerns. In addition, improvements are required on the co-channel
interference mitigation process, global power consumption and reliability.
In this work, student is encouraged to look at these issues to be improved and develop
new techniques and protocols for the next generation Green WBAN. Potential
research problems can be included as new multiuser access scheme.
The aim of this doctorate research work is to:
Make a state of art and analyze the performance, complexity and applicability
of existing methods (Duty Cycle, Power Harvesting and Dynamic Topology).
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 Identify, collect and evaluate the relevant network parameters that have
impacts on quality of scalable transmission over wireless sensors channels.
Design a mathematical model that can take into account the effects of all these
parameters on energy, quality and interferences (based on Mac Duty Cycle and
inference and learning algorithms: Bayesian networks, stochastic processes, neural
networks )
Required skills
1) A Masters degree in Computer Communications, Networking or related fields.
2) Good understanding of the fundamental of wireless and sensor communication,
3) Strong programming skills in: C, C++, MATLAB, NS2, etc.
4) Mathematical skills: knowledge in optimization theory, machine learning theory,
Bayesian networks, stochastic processes, etc.
Contact
Dr. Hassine Moungla - A. Professor
RMS Team - LIPADE Labs
Paris Descartes University
45 rue des Saints-Pres, 75270 Paris cedex 06
Phone : (+33) 1 83 94 58 06
Bibliography
[1] Anagha Jamthe, Amitabh Mishra, and Dharma P Agrawal. Scheduling schemes for
interference suppression in healthcare sensor networks. In Communications (ICC),
2014 IEEE International Conference on, pages 391396. IEEE, 2014.
[2] Jie Dong and David Smith. Opportunistic relaying in wireless body area networks:
Coexistence performance. In Communications (ICC), 2013 IEEE International
Conference on, pages 56135618. IEEE, 2013.
[3] Bahl, P.; Adya, A.; Padhye, J.; Walman, A. Reconsidering Wireless Systems with
Multiple Radios. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 2004, 34, 3946.
[4] Friedman, R.; Kogan, A. Power Aware Management Middleware for Multiple Radio
Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 10th International Middleware Conference, Urbana,
IL, USA, 30 November4 December 2009; pp. 288307.
[5]. Qin, H.; Wang, Y.; Zhang, W. Zigbee-Assisted WiFi Transmission for Multi-Interface
Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of the 8th International ICST Conference, MobiQuitous
2011, Copenhagen, Denmark, 69 December 2011; pp. 248259
[6] J. N. Bae, et al., Efficient Interference Cancellation for Wireless Body Area Network,
Journal of Communication and Networks, Volume:13, Issue:2, pp. 167-174, April
2011.
[7] Jie Dong and David Smith. Joint relay selection and transmit power control for
wireless body area networks coexistence. In Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE
International Conference on, pages 56765681. IEEE, 2014.
[9] S. Xiao, et al, Transmission power control in body area sensor networks for
healthcare monitoring, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications,
Volume:27, Issue:1, January 2009.
[10] R. Kazemi, et al, Inter-Network Interference Mitigation in Wireless Body Area
Networks Using Power Control Games, 10th International Symposium on
Communications and Information Technologies, Tokyo, Japan, October 2010.
[11] H. Moungla, N. Touati, A. Mehaoua: "Cost Efficient Deployment and Reliable
Routing Modeling based Multi-Objective Optimization for Dynamic Wireless Body
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Sensor Networks Topology", International Journal of E-Health and Medical

Communications (IJEHMC), 27 pages, to appear.
[12] H. Moungla, N. Touati, A. Mehaoua : A Reliable, Efficient Routing Protocol for
Dynamic Topology in Wireless Body Area Networks using Min-Max multi-commodity
flow model, in 14th IEEE International Conference on e-Health Networking
Applications and Services (IEEE Healthcom 2012), Beijin, China, October 2012.
[13] R Zhang, H Moungla, A Mehaoua: Delay Analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA
Mechanism in Duty-Cycling WBANs; IEEE Global Communications Conference (IEEE
GLOBECOM 2015).
[14] R Zhang, H Moungla, A Mehaoua: A reliable and energy-efficient leader election
algorithm for Wireless Body Area Networks, (IEEE ICC 2015).