Efficient Wireless Communication in Healthcare Systems; Design and Performance Evaluation

Description

Increasing number of ageing population and people who need continuous health monitoring and rising the costs of health care have triggered the concept of the novel wireless technology-driven human body monitoring. Human body monitoring can be performed using a network of small and intelligent wireless medical sensors which may be attached to the body surface or implanted into the tissues. It enables carers to predict, diagnose, and react to adverse events earlier than ever. The concept of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) was introduced to fully exploit the benefits of wireless technologies in telemedicine and m-health.
The main focus of this research is the design and performance evaluation of strategies and architectures that would allow seamless and efficient interconnection of patient’s body area network and the stationary (e.g., hospital room or ward) wireless networks. I first introduce the architecture of a healthcare system which bridges WBANs and Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). I adopt IEEE 802.15.6 standard for the patient’s body network because it is specifically designed for WBANs. Since IEEE 802.15.6 has strict Quality of Service (QoS) and priorities to transfer the medical data to the medical server a QoS-enabled WLAN for the next hop is needed to preserve the end-to-end QoS. IEEE 802.11e standard is selected for the WLAN in the hospital room or ward because it provides prioritization for the stations in the network. I investigate in detail the requirements posed by different healthcare parameters and to analyze the performance of various alternative interconnection strategies, using the rigorous mathematical apparatus of Queuing Theory and Probabilistic Analysis; these results are independently validated through discrete event simulation models.
This thesis has three main parts; performance evaluation and MAC parameters settings of IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), performance evaluation and tuning the MAC parameters of IEEE 802.15.6, and designing a seamless and efficient interconnection strategy which bridges IEEE 802.11e EDCA and IEEE 802.15.6 standards for a healthcare system.

Links & Downloads

1. S. Rashwand and J. Misic, “IEEE 802.11e EDCA under bursty traffic - how much TXOP can improve performance,” IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT), vol. 60, pp. 1099–1115, 2011.
2. J. Misic and S. Rashwand, “Analysis of impact of TXOP allocation on IEEE 802.11e EDCA under variable network load,” IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), vol. 23, pp. 785–799, 2012.
3. J. Misic, S. Rashwand, and V. B. Misic, “Stability boundaries between nonsaturation and saturation regimes for IEEE 802.11e EDCA,” in Proc. the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC’10), Cape Town, South Africa, May 2010.
4. S. Rashwand and J. Misic, “Stable operation of IEEE 802.11e EDCA; interaction between offered load and MAC parameters,” Ad Hoc Networks Journal; Special Issue: IEEE 802.11e/p, vol. 10, pp. 162–173, 2012.
5. S. Rashwand and J. Misic, “Impacts of node population and TXOP on stable operation of IEEE 802.11e EDCA,” in Proc. the IEEE International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC10), Caen, France, Jun. 2010.
6. S. Rashwand, J. Misic, and H. Khazaei, “IEEE 802.15.6 under saturation: Some problems to be expected,” Journal of Communications and Networks, vol. 13, pp. 142–149, 2011.
7. S. Rashwand, J. Misic, and H. Khazaei, “Performance analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 under saturation condition and error-prone channel,” in Proc. the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’11), Cancun, Mexico, Mar. 2011, pp. 475–480.
8. S. Rashwand and J. Misic, “Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.6 under nonsaturation condition,” in Proc. the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (Globecom11), Houston, Texas, US., Dec. 2011.
9. S. Rashwand and J. Misic, “Effects of access phases lengths on performance of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA mechanism,” Journal of Computer Networks (COMNET), vol. 56, pp. 2832–2846, Aug. 2012.
10. S. Rashwand and J. Misic, “Frame delay analysis of CSMA mechanism of IEEE 802.15.6,” IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2012, Under Revision.
11. S. Rashwand, J. Misic, and V. B. Misic, “MAC performance modeling of IEEE 802.15.6-based WBANs over rician-faded channels,” in Proc. the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC’12), Ottawa, Canada, Jun. 2012.
12. S. Rashwand and J. Misic, “Impact of priority differentiation on the bridged WBAN/WLAN healthcare networks,” Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (WCMC), to appear.
13. http://hdl.handle.net/1993/9227

Tags

Wireless Healthcare Networks

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN)

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)

Performance Evaluation

Wireless Communication

IEEE 802.15.6

IEEE 802.11e EDCA

Additional Fields

Identifer	oai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/9227
Date	January 2012
Creators	Rashwand, Saeed
Contributors	Misic, Jelena (Computer Science) Eskicioglu, Rasit (Computer Science), Cai, Lin (Electrical and Computer Engineering, Victoria University) Alfa, Attahiru S. (Electrical and Computer Engineering) Thulasiraman, Parimala (Computer Science)
Publisher	IEEE, JCN
Source Sets	University of Manitoba Canada
Detected Language	English