A Survey of MAC Protocols for Cognitive Radio Body Area Networks
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paper_title: A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks: Technologies and Design Challenges

paper_content:

Interest in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has increased significantly in recent years thanks to the advances in microelectronics and wireless communications. Owing to the very stringent application requirements in terms of reliability, energy efficiency, and low device complexity, the design of these networks requires the definition of new protocols with respect to those used in general purpose wireless sensor networks. This motivates the effort in research activities and in standardisation process of the last years. This survey paper aims at reporting an overview of WBAN main applications, technologies and standards, issues in WBANs design, and evolutions. Some case studies are reported, based on both real implementation and experimentation on the field, and on simulations. These results have the aim of providing useful insights for WBAN designers and of highlighting the main issues affecting the performance of these kind of networks.
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paper_title: A Survey on M2M Systems for mHealth: A Wireless Communications Perspective

paper_content:

In the new era of connectivity, marked by the explosive number of wireless electronic devices and the need for smart and pervasive applications, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications are an emerging technology that enables the seamless device interconnection without the need of human interaction. The use of M2M technology can bring to life a wide range of mHealth applications, with considerable benefits for both patients and healthcare providers. Many technological challenges have to be met, however, to ensure the widespread adoption of mHealth solutions in the future. In this context, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey on M2M systems for mHealth applications from a wireless communication perspective. An end-to-end holistic approach is adopted, focusing on different communication aspects of the M2M architecture. Hence, we first provide a systematic review of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), which constitute the enabling technology at the patient's side, and then discuss end-to-end solutions that involve the design and implementation of practical mHealth applications. We close the survey by identifying challenges and open research issues, thus paving the way for future research opportunities.
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paper_title: A Comprehensive Survey of MAC Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks

paper_content:

In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols developed for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In WBANs, small battery operated on-body or implanted biomedical sensor nodes are used to monitor physiological signs such as temperature, blood pressure, ElectroCardioGram (ECG), ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) etc. We discuss design requirements for WBANs with major sources of energy dissipation. Then, we further investigate the existing designed protocols for WBANs with focus on their strengths and weaknesses. Paper ends up with concluding remarks and open research issues for future work.
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paper_title: WiseMAC: an ultra low power MAC protocol for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

This work proposes wiseMAC(wireless sensor MAC) for the downlink of infrastructure wireless sensor networks. WiseMAC is a novel energy efficient medium access control protocol based on synchronized preamble sampling. The trade-off between power consumption and delay is analyzed, focusing on low traffic. WiseMAC is compared analytically with the power management protocol used in the IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee standard. It is shown that WiseMAC can provide a significantly lower power consumption for the same delay.
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paper_title: An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in almost every way: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules. Inspired by PAMAS, S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-and-forward processing as data move through the network. We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the Mote, developed at University of California, Berkeley. The experiment results show that, on a source node, an 802.11-like MAC consumes 2-6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load with messages sent every 1-10 s.
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paper_title: Distributed Coordinated Spectrum Sharing MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio

paper_content:

Recently, the CR (cognitive radio) technology is gathering more and more attention because it has the capacity to deal with the scarce of the precious spectrum resource. Within the domain of CR technology, channel management of CR is of utmost importance due to its key role in the performance enhancement of the transmission and the minimum interference to the primary users as well. An 802.11 WLAN based ad-hoc protocol using the cognitive radio has been proposed in this paper. It provides the detection and protection for incumbent systems around the communication pair by separating the spectrum into the data channels and common control channel. By adding the available channel list into the RTS and CTS, the communication pair can know which data sub channels are available (i.e., no incumbent signal). We proposed an ENNI (exchanging of neighbor nodes information) mechanism to deal with the hidden incumbent device problem. The simulation results show that by using our protocol the hidden incumbent device problem (HIDP) can be solved successfully.
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paper_title: A MAC protocol for cognitive wireless body area sensor networking

paper_content:

In this paper, a Cognitive Radio based Medium Access Control (CR-MAC) protocol for Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASN) that utilizes cognitive radio transmission is proposed. In this proposal, the sensor nodes are classified into nodes of life-critical health information, and nodes of non-critical health information. The CR-MAC protocol prioritizes the critical packets access to the transmission medium by transmitting them with higher power while transmitting lower priority packets using lower transmission power. At the receiver, a higher priority packet experience collision only when there are more than one critical packet transmission at the same time slot while non critical packets experience collision when there are more than one transmission at the same time slot. This protocol is evaluated analytically. The obtained results demonstrate a differentiated service system which prioritizes critical traffic access to the transmission medium and increases the critical traffic throughput.
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paper_title: Dynamic Channel Adjustable Asynchronous Cognitive Radio MAC Protocol for Wireless Medical Body Area Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Medical body area networks (MBAN) impose several requirements to the medium access control layer which have various contexts: energy efficiency, QoS providing, reliability. And a cognitive radio (CR) network should be able to sense its environment and adapt communication to utilize the unused licensed spectrum without interfering with licensed users. As CR nodes need to hop from channel to channel to make the most use of the spectrum opportunities, we consider asynchronous medium access control (MAC) protocols to be solution for these networks. The DCAA-MAC protocol presented in this paper has been designed has been designed specifically for wireless body area network with cognitive radio capability. The DCAA-MAC protocol has energy-efficiency, low latency, and no synchronization overhead by provide asynchronous and fast channel switching. Analytical models are shown to perform at low energy consumption, to scale well with network size.
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paper_title: Study on ZigBee technology

paper_content:

Wireless Sensor Networks are being gradually introduced in different application scenarios. ZigBee is one of the most widely used transceiver standard in wireless sensor networks. ZigBee over IEEE 802.15.4., defines specifications for low data rate WPAN (LR-WPAN) to support low power monitoring and controlling devices. This paper presents a detailed study of Zigbee wireless standard, IEEE 802.15.4 specification, ZigBee device types, the protocol stack architecture and its applications.
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paper_title: A Survey on MAC Strategies for Cognitive Radio Networks

paper_content:

Dynamic spectrum policies combined with software defined radio are powerful means to improve the overall spectral efficiency allowing the development of new wireless services and technologies. Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols exploit sensing stimuli to build up a spectrum opportunity map (cognitive sensing). Available resources are scheduled (dynamic spectrum allocation), improving coexistence between users that belong to heterogeneous systems (dynamic spectrum sharing). Furthermore, MAC protocols may allow cognitive users to vacate selected channels when their quality becomes unacceptable (dynamic spectrum mobility). The contribution of this survey is threefold. First, we show the fundamental role of the MAC layer and identify its functionalities in a cognitive radio (CR) network. Second, a classification of cognitive MAC protocols is proposed. Third, advantages, drawbacks, and further design challenges of cognitive MAC protocols are discussed.
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paper_title: Asynchronous MAC protocol for spectrum agility in Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

paper_content:

A Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) is a special-purpose Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that supports remote monitoring and entertainment applications. The energy consumption plays an important role in the design of this specific sensor network. Unfortunately, the performance of WBASNs decreases in high interference environments such as the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band where wireless spectrums are getting crowded. In this paper, an energy-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol named C-RICER (Cognitive-Receiver Initiated CyclEd Receiver) is specifically designed for WBASN to cognitively work in high interference environment. C-RICER protocol adapts both transmission power and channel frequency to reduce the interferences and thus, the energy consumption. The protocol is simulated thanks to OMNET++ simulator. Simulation results show that, depending on the interference level, C-RICER is able to outperform the traditional RICER protocol in terms of energy consumption, packet delay, and network throughput.
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paper_title: Physical layer designs for WBAN systems in IEEE 802.15.6 proposals

paper_content:

This paper presents the trend of physical layer designs for WBAN systems in IEEE 802.15.6 proposals. According to the technical requirement of the WBAN task group, many companies and research institutes have proposed physical layer architectures to provide fundamental technologies for the WBAN communication systems. Since there are various service scenarios for in-body or on-body applications, the physical layer proposals include UWB as well as narrowband techniques. Hence we summarize the design issues for the physical layer proposals with the category of narrowband and UWB signals. The key features of the proposals are described with the frequency bands, modulations, and other technical aspects.
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paper_title: Body Area Networks: A Survey

paper_content:

Advances in wireless communication technologies, such as wearable and implantable biosensors, along with recent developments in the embedded computing area are enabling the design, development, and implementation of body area networks. This class of networks is paving the way for the deployment of innovative healthcare monitoring applications. In the past few years, much of the research in the area of body area networks has focused on issues related to wireless sensor designs, sensor miniaturization, low-power sensor circuitry, signal processing, and communications protocols. In this paper, we present an overview of body area networks, and a discussion of BAN communications types and their related issues. We provide a detailed investigation of sensor devices, physical layer, data link layer, and radio technology aspects of BAN research. We also present a taxonomy of BAN projects that have been introduced/proposed to date. Finally, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make BANs truly ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.
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paper_title: Channel ranking algorithms for cognitive coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4

paper_content:

Widespread proliferation of competitive technologies in licence free Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) radio band is squeezing the room in frequency, temporal and spatial domain for the reliable operation of low power, low cost, IEEE 802.15.4 devices. In this context, providing some intelligence to IEEE 802.15.4 devices to analyze the environment and find the least interfered channel can result in significant improvement in performance and reliability. In this paper we prototyped a test bed that emulate wireless channels in order to evaluate the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 devices under varying IEEE 802.11 activities in different environments. The limiting thresholds for the sustainable operation are determined. Based on the thresholds, two algorithms have been proposed to rank the channels according to interference signal strength and activity level. The effectiveness of the algorithms is also verified by ranking both emulated and real channels.
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paper_title: HCVP: A Hybrid Cognitive Validation Platform for WBAN

paper_content:

Cognitive Radio (CR) is widely anticipated to address spectrum scarcity and interference issues in future wireless communications. As a promising technology, many CR related studies have sprung up to improve the performance of network. However, most existing works mainly focus on theoretical analysis and software simulation without verifying feasibility and performance in practical network scenarios. In this paper, a Hybrid Cognitive Validation Platform (HCVP) is developed to realize practical situations by integrating computer software and hardware devices. Comparing with existing FPGA-based platforms, our HCVP is easier to deploy and configure, by replacing FPGA with low-power programmable SoC chips. Moreover, with excellent performance of energy efficiency, HCVP can be applied to a wide scope of applications, especially battery-powered networks. To evaluate the performance of the HCVP, we implement a WBAN scenario with same frequency interference traffic considered. An adaptive CR MAC algorithm is adopted to minimize the impact of interference. Experiments close to reality are built based on HCVP and the results show that the introduction of CR algorithm significantly alleviate the negative impact of collisions caused by interference and improve system performance.
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paper_title: Dynamic Channel Adjustable Asynchronous Cognitive Radio MAC Protocol for Wireless Medical Body Area Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Medical body area networks (MBAN) impose several requirements to the medium access control layer which have various contexts: energy efficiency, QoS providing, reliability. And a cognitive radio (CR) network should be able to sense its environment and adapt communication to utilize the unused licensed spectrum without interfering with licensed users. As CR nodes need to hop from channel to channel to make the most use of the spectrum opportunities, we consider asynchronous medium access control (MAC) protocols to be solution for these networks. The DCAA-MAC protocol presented in this paper has been designed has been designed specifically for wireless body area network with cognitive radio capability. The DCAA-MAC protocol has energy-efficiency, low latency, and no synchronization overhead by provide asynchronous and fast channel switching. Analytical models are shown to perform at low energy consumption, to scale well with network size.
---
paper_title: Asynchronous MAC protocol for spectrum agility in Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

paper_content:

A Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) is a special-purpose Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that supports remote monitoring and entertainment applications. The energy consumption plays an important role in the design of this specific sensor network. Unfortunately, the performance of WBASNs decreases in high interference environments such as the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band where wireless spectrums are getting crowded. In this paper, an energy-efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol named C-RICER (Cognitive-Receiver Initiated CyclEd Receiver) is specifically designed for WBASN to cognitively work in high interference environment. C-RICER protocol adapts both transmission power and channel frequency to reduce the interferences and thus, the energy consumption. The protocol is simulated thanks to OMNET++ simulator. Simulation results show that, depending on the interference level, C-RICER is able to outperform the traditional RICER protocol in terms of energy consumption, packet delay, and network throughput.
---
paper_title: A MAC protocol for cognitive wireless body area sensor networking

paper_content:

In this paper, a Cognitive Radio based Medium Access Control (CR-MAC) protocol for Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASN) that utilizes cognitive radio transmission is proposed. In this proposal, the sensor nodes are classified into nodes of life-critical health information, and nodes of non-critical health information. The CR-MAC protocol prioritizes the critical packets access to the transmission medium by transmitting them with higher power while transmitting lower priority packets using lower transmission power. At the receiver, a higher priority packet experience collision only when there are more than one critical packet transmission at the same time slot while non critical packets experience collision when there are more than one transmission at the same time slot. This protocol is evaluated analytically. The obtained results demonstrate a differentiated service system which prioritizes critical traffic access to the transmission medium and increases the critical traffic throughput.
---
paper_title: HCVP: A Hybrid Cognitive Validation Platform for WBAN

paper_content:

Cognitive Radio (CR) is widely anticipated to address spectrum scarcity and interference issues in future wireless communications. As a promising technology, many CR related studies have sprung up to improve the performance of network. However, most existing works mainly focus on theoretical analysis and software simulation without verifying feasibility and performance in practical network scenarios. In this paper, a Hybrid Cognitive Validation Platform (HCVP) is developed to realize practical situations by integrating computer software and hardware devices. Comparing with existing FPGA-based platforms, our HCVP is easier to deploy and configure, by replacing FPGA with low-power programmable SoC chips. Moreover, with excellent performance of energy efficiency, HCVP can be applied to a wide scope of applications, especially battery-powered networks. To evaluate the performance of the HCVP, we implement a WBAN scenario with same frequency interference traffic considered. An adaptive CR MAC algorithm is adopted to minimize the impact of interference. Experiments close to reality are built based on HCVP and the results show that the introduction of CR algorithm significantly alleviate the negative impact of collisions caused by interference and improve system performance.
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paper_title: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks

paper_content:

The draft IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) specification is approaching completion. In this article, the IEEE 802.11 protocol is explained, with particular emphasis on the medium access control sublayer. Performance results are provided for packetized data and a combination of packetized data and voice over the WLAN. Our performance investigation reveals that an IEEE 802.11 network may be able to carry traffic with time-bounded requirements using the point coordination function. However, our findings suggest that packetized voice traffic must be handled in conjunction with an echo canceler.
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paper_title: Energy-efficient and reliability-driven cooperative communications in cognitive body area networks

paper_content:

We study the potential of cognition and co-operation in Body Area Networks (BANs). On one hand, most BAN-based applications involve end-to-end transmission across heterogenous networks. Cognitive communication has been known to be an effective technology for addressing network heterogeneity. On the other hand, a BAN is normally required to provide reliable communications and operate in a very low power level to conserve energy and reduce the electromagnetic radiation impact on human body. Cooperative communication has been known to enhance the transmission reliability and maintain low transmission power. However, the joint cognitive and cooperative mechanism has not been investigated yet in the literature. In this paper, we propose a network architecture for cognitive and cooperative communications in BANs. An intelligent mobile device is introduced as either a cognitive gateway to interconnect heterogenous networks; or a cooperative relay node to achieve transmission diversity. Two cooperative transmission schemes, Energy-conserved Cooperative Transmission and Reliability-driven Cooperative Transmission, are presented for different applications that have distinct energy consumption or reliability requirement. Optimization problems are formulated to optimally allocate power in the cooperative transmission. Results indicate that cooperative transmission schemes can significantly decrease Bit Error Rate (BER) and reduce energy consumption, compared to the non-cooperative schemes. The BER gain is over one order in the high SNR region, while the energy consumption can save up to 50% in the low BER region.
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paper_title: Electromagnetic interference from radio frequency identification inducing potentially hazardous incidents in critical care medical equipment.

paper_content:

CONTEXT ::: Health care applications of autoidentification technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), have been proposed to improve patient safety and also the tracking and tracing of medical equipment. However, electromagnetic interference (EMI) by RFID on medical devices has never been reported. ::: ::: ::: OBJECTIVE ::: To assess and classify incidents of EMI by RFID on critical care equipment. ::: ::: ::: DESIGN AND SETTING ::: Without a patient being connected, EMI by 2 RFID systems (active 125 kHz and passive 868 MHz) was assessed under controlled conditions during May 2006, in the proximity of 41 medical devices (in 17 categories, 22 different manufacturers) at the Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Assessment took place according to an international test protocol. Incidents of EMI were classified according to a critical care adverse events scale as hazardous, significant, or light. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: In 123 EMI tests (3 per medical device), RFID induced 34 EMI incidents: 22 were classified as hazardous, 2 as significant, and 10 as light. The passive 868-MHz RFID signal induced a higher number of incidents (26 incidents in 41 EMI tests; 63%) compared with the active 125-kHz RFID signal (8 incidents in 41 EMI tests; 20%); difference 44% (95% confidence interval, 27%-53%; P < .001). The passive 868-MHz RFID signal induced EMI in 26 medical devices, including 8 that were also affected by the active 125-kHz RFID signal (26 in 41 devices; 63%). The median distance between the RFID reader and the medical device in all EMI incidents was 30 cm (range, 0.1-600 cm). ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: In a controlled nonclinical setting, RFID induced potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices. Implementation of RFID in the critical care environment should require on-site EMI tests and updates of international standards.
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paper_title: Data security and privacy in wireless body area networks

paper_content:

The wireless body area network has emerged as a new technology for e-healthcare that allows the data of a patient's vital body parameters and movements to be collected by small wearable or implantable sensors and communicated using short-range wireless communication techniques. WBAN has shown great potential in improving healthcare quality, and thus has found a wide range of applications from ubiquitous health monitoring and computer assisted rehabilitation to emergency medical response systems. The security and privacy protection of the data collected from a WBAN, either while stored inside the WBAN or during their transmission outside of the WBAN, is a major unsolved concern, with challenges coming from stringent resource constraints of WBAN devices, and the high demand for both security/privacy and practicality/usability. In this article we look into two important data security issues: secure and dependable distributed data storage, and fine-grained distributed data access control for sensitive and private patient medical data. We discuss various practical issues that need to be taken into account while fulfilling the security and privacy requirements. Relevant solutions in sensor networks and WBANs are surveyed, and their applicability is analyzed.
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paper_title: On Cognitive Radio-based Wireless Body Area Networks for medical applications

paper_content:

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is envisioned to provide a wide range of health-care services to patients in medical environment such as hospitals and clinics. This increases the deployment of wireless platforms in medical environment that bring new challenges, such as interference with neighboring medical devices and the degradation of Quality of Service (QoS) performance, which may be critical to patient's safety. Cognitive Radio (CR) is next-generation wireless communications, and artificial intelligence has been widely adopted to provide self-learning in order to observe, learn and take action against its operating environment. The application of CR in medical wireless environment can cater to the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we present a review on the limited literature on CR-based WBAN, highlighting some pioneering schemes in this area. We present two architectures, two state-of-the-art applications of CR (i.e. Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) reduction and QoS enhancement), as well as a number of schemes in CR-based WBAN. While there are numerous research efforts investigating CR and WBAN respectively, the research into CR-based WBAN remains at the infancy stage. This paper discusses various open issues related to CR-based WBAN in order to spark new interests in this research area.
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Title: A Survey of MAC Protocols for Cognitive Radio Body Area Networks

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Introduce the concept of Cognitive Radio Body Area Networks (CRBANs) and provide an overview of the advancements and applications in this field.

Section 2: MAC Design Issues in CRBANs
Description 2: Discuss the critical design challenges for MAC protocols in CRBANs, including spectrum access, energy efficiency, cross-layer design, opportunistic sensing, and optimized spectrum decision.

Section 3: MAC Protocols for CRBANs
Description 3: Review and highlight existing MAC protocols designed for CRBANs with details on their key characteristics and features.

Section 4: Comparison of MAC Protocols
Description 4: Compare and discuss the MAC protocols designed for CRBANs with respect to various parameters such as collision ratio, channel access parameters, and energy consumption.

Section 5: Open Research Issues and Challenges
Description 5: Present the ongoing challenges and open research issues in designing reliable and efficient MAC protocols for CRBANs.

Section 6: Conclusions
Description 6: Summarize the key findings from the survey and suggest future research directions for MAC protocols in CRBANs.