Chapter 3

Wireless Body Area

Networks
 Learning objectives
To know about wireless body area networks
(WBANs).
To be familiar with the architecture of WBANs.
To know about the design considerations of WBAN.
To study the different layer protocols of WBANs.
To know about the WBANs technologies.
To illustrate the applications of WBANs.
 Wireless body area network
(WBAN)
A special type of sensor network with its own spefic
requirements.
WBAN consists of a set of mobile and compact
intercommunicating sensors, either wearable or
implanted into the human body, which monitor vital
body parameters and movements.
These devices, communicating through wireless
technologies, transmit data from the body to a home
base station, from where the data can be forwarded to
a hospital, clinic or elsewhere, real-time.
The WBAN technology is still in its primitive stage,
once accepted and adopted, is expected to be a
breakthrough invention in health care, leading to
concepts like m-health becoming real.
Characteristics of WBAN
WBAN architecture
 Network components
A number of physiological sensors depending on the
end-user application. Some of them are:
An ECG (electrocardiogram) sensor for monitoring heart
activity.
An EMG (electromyography) sensor for monitoring muscle
activity.
An EEG (electroencephalography) sensor for monitoring
brain electrical activity.
A blood pressure sensor.
A tilt sensor for monitoring trunk position.
A breathing sensor for monitoring respiration.
Movement sensors used to estimate user's activity.
A smart sock sensor or a sensor equipped shoe insole used to
delineate phase of individual steps.
 Design issues
Node types
Sampling rate for the sensor node
Operating power
Size and weight of sensors
Sensor node identification and association
Sensor node calibration
Processing
Social issues
 Network protocols
Protocols for WBANs can be divided in intra-body
communication and extra-body communication ones.
The first control the information handling between the
sensors or actuators and the sink,
The latter ensure communication between the sink and an
external network.
 Physical layer
Inductive coupling
Method to provide a communication link to implanted
devices, with an external coil held very close to the patient
that couples to a coil implanted just below the skin surface.
Its use is subject to regulation for maximum Specific
Absorption Rate (SAR).
SAR is a measure of the rate at which radio frequency energy is
absorbed by the body when exposed to radio frequency
electromagnetic field. It is defined as the power absorbed per mass
of tissue and has units of watts per kilogram.
 Physical layer (Contd..)
RF communication
Usage of antennas
Modulation techniques
 Data link layer
Includes an error detecting mechanism by applying a
cyclic redundancy check (CRC) on the payload. If an
error is detected, three dierent approaches are
available:
Accept that the payload is erroneous and use it anyway
(typically done in voice applications).
Drop the data and wait for the next transmission.
Ask for a retransmission of the data from the source. The
application must be the one deciding if there should be
retransmission scheme or not.
Media Access Control (MAC) layer
Decides who has the right to send.
Two main classes of MAC protocols are available:
contention based and contention free channel access.
Three straightforward methods are available for
contention free channel access:
polling, strobing and cyclic broadcast.
 Sensor MAC (S-MAC)
Instead of continuously sensing the channel, the S-
MAC protocol puts the node in sleep state. If there is
no event, then the node goes to sleep state and turns
off the radio to save the energy and sets a timer to
awake itself later.
 Timeout-MAC (T-MAC)
Eliminates the idle energy by adaptively setting the
length of the active portion of the frames.
Rather than allowing messages to be sent throughout
a predetermined active period, as in S-MAC,
messages are transmitted in bursts at the beginning of
the frame.
A node will keep listening and potentially
transmitting, as long as it is in an active period.
An active period ends when no activation event has
occurred for a time TA.
Timeout-MAC (Contd..)
 WiseMAC
WiseMAC is a medium access control protocol
designed for the WiseNETTM wireless sensor
network.
It is based on CSMA and uses the preamble sampling
technique to minimize the power consumed when
listening to an idle medium.
A unique feature of this protocol is to exploit the
knowledge of the sampling schedule of its direct
neighbors in order to use a wake-up preamble of
minimized size.
This scheme allows not only to reduce the transmit
and the receive power consumption, but also brings a
drastic reduction of the energy wasted due to
overhearing.
WiseMAC (Contd..)
 Berkeley MAC (B-MAC)
Performs a busy tone-like signaling on the data
channel using a very long message preamble.
It must be large enough to allow the receiver to wake up,
hear it and decide that it must stay on to receive the
message.
Operation sequence of the scheme
Sender listens to Channel, if the channel is idle the sender
sleeps for some time.
In the same manner if channel is idle at the receiver, the
receiver goes to sleep state after listening to the channel.
When the channel access is required, sender generates a
very long message preamble to wake up the receiver.
When the receiver hears a long message preamble, it
decides to stay on to receive the message.
Berkeley MAC (Contd..)
 SCP-MAC
Combines the Scheduling and Channel Polling.
The scheme of SCP-MAC is as follows:
Synchronization of the polling times (schedules) of sender
and receiver takes place.
When a sender has a packet to send, it waits in sleep state
until the receiver's time to poll the channel. It performs
carrier sense within the first contention window and then
sends a short wakeup tone to activate the receiver.
After a sender wakes up a receiver, it enters the second
contention window. If the node still detects channel idle in
the second contention phase, it starts sending data to the
receiver without any contention.
 Wireless Autonomous Spanning
Tree protocol (WASP)
Uses a spanning tree for medium access coordination
and traffic routing.
WASP scheme is a method of construction of the tree
structure, that the nodes only can hear their parent,
their siblings and their children.
 WASP (Contd..)
The sequence of operation of WASP scheme is as
follows:
In a WASP-cycle each node is allowed to send its data
and/or to forward data received in the previous cycle to the
next node.
At the beginning of each cycle, the sink sends its WASP
schemes to its children.
WASP scheme informs the sink's children when they can
send their children.
Children respond to the scheme by sending out their own
WASP scheme in their designated time slots.
Thus each node right below the sink calculates its own
WASP scheme and sends it to own children which form the
second level.
On-their turn, these nodes send out the WASP-scheme and
so on.
WASP (Contd..)
 Collision Free Real-Time (CFRT)
Basically divides time into frames in which only one
node is allowed to transmit.
The scheduling order is derived by a message table
stored in each node and is identical for all the nodes
so that each of them knows when it has the right to
transmit.
The table contains an entry for each node allowed to
transmit or receive in a frame.
 Network layer
Sensor Protocol for Information via Negotiation
(SPIN)
The operation sequence of the SPIN protocol is as
follows:
Nodes advertise their data with advertisement (ADV) messages.
Any node interested in receiving the data replies with a request (REQ)
message.
The source node replies with the transmission of the actual data to the
requested node.
The receiving node then advertises this new data to it's neighbors.
This processes continues.
 Low Energy Adaptive Clustering
Hierarchy (LEACH)
Instead of forwarding all sensors data to a base
station that is monitoring the environment, nodes
within a region can collaborate and send only a single
summarization packet for the region.
In LEACH, nodes are divided into clusters, each
containing a cluster head whose role is considerably
more energy intensive than the rest of the nodes; for
this reason, nodes rotate roles between cluster head
and ordinary sensor throughout the lifetime of the
network.
 Span
Span is a topology control protocol that allows nodes
that are not involved in a routing backbone to sleep
for extended periods of time.
In Span, certain nodes assign themselves the position
of coordinator.
These coordinator nodes are chosen to form a backbone of
the network, so that the capacity of the backbone
approaches the potential capacity of the complete network.
Periodically, nodes that have not assigned themselves the
coordinator role initiate a procedure to decide if they
should become a coordinator.
 WBAN technologies
The most widely used currently commercially
available WBAN technologies include Bluetooth and
ZigBee.
Bluetooth: Bluetooth is a low tier, ad hoc, terrestrial,
wireless standard for short range communication. The
IEEE 802.15.1 standard contains the Bluetooth
specification.
It is designed for small and low cost devices with low
power consumption.
 WBAN technologies (Contd..)
ZigBee: ZigBee is a low tier, ad hoc, terrestrial,
wireless standard in some ways similar to Bluetooth.
The Zigbee is a commercial standard which develops
the application on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard
that defines the PHY and the MAC layer.
It operates in the 68 MHz, 915 MHz and 2.4 GHz
Industrial, Science and Medical (ISM) bands.
It is possible to develop medical applications on a
Zigbee standard by appropriately defining higher
layer procedures.
Zigbee devices can transmit up to 250 kbs at 2.4 GHz
which is sufficient data rate for typical WBAN
applications.
 WBAN applications
The ubiquitous health care system enables medical
professionals to remotely perform real-time
monitoring, early diagnosis, and treatment for
potential risky diseases.
The medical diagnosis and patient consultations can
be delivered via wire/wireless communication
channels.
Ubiquitous health care system can provide a cheaper
and smart way to manage and care for patients
suffering from age-related chronic diseases, such as
heart disease, because chronic diseases require
continuous, long-term monitoring rather than episodic
assessments.
 WBAN applications (Contd..)
A WBAN network in place on a patient can alert the
hospital, even before he has a heart attack, through
measuring changes in his vital signs.
A WBAN network on a diabetic patient could auto
inject insulin though a pump, as soon as his insulin
level declines, thus making the patient `doctor-free'
and virtually healthy.
Other applications of this technology include sports,
military, or security.