Software-defined application-specific traffic management for wireless body area networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2020.01.052Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A flexible and scalable SDWBAN framework with dynamic control over the network with growing number of applications.

  • An efficient application classification algorithm to support various application of WBAN.

  • A modified version of Sector Based Distance routing for SDWBAN framework.

  • Implementation and evaluation of proposed framework in CASTALIA simulator.

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are usually used to collect and monitor health-related information for both critical and non-critical patients. However, the traditional WBAN communication framework is unable to guarantee the successful delivery of critical information due to a lack of administrative control and priority support for emergency data. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a novel software-defined networking (SDN)-based WBAN (SDWBAN) framework for application-specific traffic management. An application classification algorithm and a packet flow mechanism are developed by incorporating SDN principles with WBAN to effectively manage complex and critical traffic in the network. Furthermore, a Sector-Based Distance (SBD) protocol is designed and utilized to facilitate the SDWBAN communication framework. Finally, the proposed SDWBAN framework is evaluated through the CASTALIA simulator in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and latency. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed system achieves high throughput and low latency for emergency traffic in SDWBANs.

Introduction

The unprecedented development of information and communication technologies in every sphere of life, especially in medical sectors, has given us more secure and seamless healthcare services. The sensing and monitoring capabilities of tiny electronic devices known as ‘sensors’ enable the real-time collection, storage and processing of various health data. Such capabilities have made a significant contribution to monitoring and diagnosing patients not only in hospitals, but also in elderly homes, private homes, remote areas and so on. The wireless communication framework of sensors in patient monitoring offers a flexible and almost no infrastructure deployment in the network where the sensors can be attached to or implanted inside the human body for monitoring physiological parameters such as blood pressure, heart rate, glucose level, and temperature [1]. This communication network is known as WBAN (see Table 1 for list of abbreviations). Due to the diverse traffic pattern of heterogeneous WBAN applications, it is critical to deal with WBAN of various applications. Moreover, the successful deployment of WBANs is very challenging in terms of utilizing appropriate technology, maintaining strict security regulations, network architecture, traffic engineering, data and QoS management. Furthermore, WBANs are also subject to many additional challenges such as, environmental challenges, physical layer challenges, media access control (MAC) layer challenges, security challenges and transport challenges. However, extensive research has been conducted to address these issues and challenges at different application levels and it is evident that a robust communication architecture with flexible, scalable and more dynamic control over WBAN operations is urgently needed to improve security and efficiency in managing data from various applications. An optimum solution to many of the challenges of WBANs could be achieved by the emerging SDN paradigm [2].

The traditional architecture of WBANs is subject to poor QoS due to a complex management system, poor resource utilization, inability for dynamic reconfiguration, inefficient traffic management and security vulnerabilities [3]. These issues are resolved in [4], where the authors claim that deploying a new application or prioritizing a new application does not require any changes in the data plane since changes in the controller can easily be made with minimal effort through a piece of coding. From a management perspective, static applications supporting the architecture of WBANs allow very little or no administrative control over the network. Moreover, the total management of the network becomes cumbersome when multiple application specific sensors from various vendors need to be installed in a WBAN. Since vendors employ different wireless transmission modules in the sensor platform, sensors from various vendors do not interoperate with each other [5]. In most cases, WBAN operators need to stick to one specific vendor device.

In traditional WBANs, there is no administrative control on data traffic as it is dependent on access mechanisms defined by different standards. Control over various types of traffic i.e. high priority, low priority is very important. This study shows how emergency applications retain low latency and high PDR in the presence of a high volume of data traffic. With the rapid advancement of SDN technology, SDN is now being considered for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), industrial automation, smart grids, healthcare and so on. Of these various applications, our primary goal is to leverage the benefits of both SDN and the Internet of Things (IoT) by tightly coupling these two emerging technologies in healthcare systems. With SDN, the network can be configured, monitored and controlled using a set of SDN controllers regardless of vendor specific network devices. The SDN controllers can deploy multiple packet dissemination schemes through managed SDN-enabled switches (SDESW) based on traffic demand [6]. In a nutshell, SDN has the potential to support complex networks of various applications.

In this paper, we propose and implement an SDWBAN framework for heterogeneous WBAN applications by managing both normal and emergency data traffic. The SDWBAN framework implements a cluster-based routing approach to route data packets from sensor nodes to the destination. More precisely, we devise a modified version of the SBD routing protocol to facilitate the packet communication model at layer 3 [7]. In the application layer, we also develop an application module named SDWBAN, which adopts a packet dissemination model from our previous work [3] to accommodate emergency and normal data traffic. Finally, we implement the proposed framework using the CASTALIA simulator [8] and analyse the performance of the framework in terms of PDR and latency. The contributions of this paper include the following:

  • A flexible and scalable SDWBAN framework that provides dynamic control over the network with growing number of applications (traffic management).

  • An efficient application classification algorithm to support various applications in WBANs.

  • A modified version of the SBD routing protocol to facilitate the SDWBAN communication framework.

  • Implementation and evaluation of the proposed framework using the CASTALIA simulator.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the related works. A contrasting architectural description of traditional a WBAN and SDWBAN is presented in Section 3. Section 4 describes the SBD analysis for SDWBAN. Section 5 provides the implementation details of the SDWBAN framework and Section 6 discusses the performance analysis of the framework. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Related works

Extensive research has been conducted on various aspects of the development of WBANs such as enhancement of the MAC layer, traffic modelling, and energy efficiency. Here, we provide a brief overview of some of the recent research.

To manage the increased traffic load, in [9], the authors proposed a cloud-assisted WBAN architecture based on the disease-centric patient group (DPG) formation process among the WBANs with a specific disease type. However, in a real-life situation, the cluster

Traditional WBAN vs SDWBAN architecture

In this section, we present a short overview of the working principles of the traditional WBAN architecture and SDWBAN architecture. In addition, we also present an architectural view of traditional WBAN vs SDWBAN to demonstrate the transformation from the conventional system to the proposed system as illustrated in Fig. 1.

SBD for SDWBAN

To support our SDWBAN framework, we propose a modified version of the SBD routing protocol [7]. The sector-based routing divides the network into multiple sectors with a sector head (SH) in each sector. The SH works as an SDESW where the SDN functionalities are implemented to retrieve control information from the controllers. Based on the control information, the SDESW routes the data packets to the appropriate destination. The SDESW is a static node which resides in the vicinity of the

The SDWBAN communication framework

In this section, we describe the communication model of our SDWBAN framework, which includes an application classification algorithm and packet flow mechanism.

Performance analysis

This section provides the implementation scenario and discusses the experimental outcomes in terms of PDR and delay.

Conclusion and future work

In this paper, we proposed an SDWBAN framework that provides administrative controls on incoming data traffic in order to prioritize sensitive data over normal data in healthcare applications. Further, an application classification algorithm and a modified version of the SBD protocol are employed to implement a data prioritization policy and to ensure the efficient routing of data packets from source to destination nodes. Finally, the proposed framework is implemented in a Castalia simulator

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Khalid Hasan is a Ph.D. candidate at School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Australia. He received his Master of Science (Radio Communication) from Aalto University, Finland in 2014. He received his Bachelor of Engineering (Communication) from International Islamic University Malaysia in 2010. His current research interests include Wireless Body Area Network, Software Defined Networking, Blockchain and Internet of Things Applications.

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    Khalid Hasan is a Ph.D. candidate at School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Australia. He received his Master of Science (Radio Communication) from Aalto University, Finland in 2014. He received his Bachelor of Engineering (Communication) from International Islamic University Malaysia in 2010. His current research interests include Wireless Body Area Network, Software Defined Networking, Blockchain and Internet of Things Applications.

    Khandakar Ahmed (SM’11 - M’15) is currently a Lecturer with the Discipline of IT, College of Engineering and Science, Victoria University. He received the Ph.D. degree from RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and M.Sc. in Network and e-Business Centred Computing (NeBCC) under the joint consortia of University of Reading, UK; Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and Charles III University of Madrid (UC3M), Spain. Khandakar has extensive industry engagement as a CI in multiple research projects related to the Internet-of-Things, smart cities, machine learning, cybersecurity and health informatics. He has published more than 50+ refereed scholar articles.

    Kamanashis Biswas is currently working as a lecturer in Information Technology in the Peter Faber Business School (Sydney), Faculty of Law and Business. He received his Ph.D. degree from School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University in 2016. He received his masters in Security Engineering from Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden in 2007. His research interests include cryptography, IDS, energy efficient and secure routing, and clustering in WSNs.

    Md. Saiful Islam is a Lecturer in the School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Australia. He has finished his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia in February, 2014. He has received his B.Sc. (Hons) and M.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2005 and 2007, respectively. His current research interests are in the areas of database usability, spatial data management and big data analytics.

    Omid Ameri Sianaki received the B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering and M.Sc. degree in Industrial Management (Operational Research) from Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran in 2000 and 2007, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from School of Information Systems, Curtin University, Perth, Australia in 2016. Currently, he is a lecturer and a Programme Convenor for Master of Applied Information Technology at Victoria University Sydney. Dr. Ameri is a Unit Convenor for two Research Project Part A and B units in Master of IT programme at Victoria University Sydney. His current research interests are in Big Data Analytics and Blockchain.

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