MINATEC

With the recent development of short range, ultra low power (ULP) and low data rate (LDR) radio technologies, e.g. Impulse-Radio Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) or Zigbee, Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) have recently gained a lot of research interests due to emerging new applications in healthcare, security, emergency applications, sports and entertainment.

With the recent development of short range, ultra low power (ULP) and low data rate (LDR) radio technologies, e.g. Impulse-Radio Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) or Zigbee, Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) have recently gained a lot of research interests due to emerging new applications in healthcare, security, emergency applications, sports and entertainment.
A wireless body sensor network (WBSN) is a self-organizing network at the human body scale, which consists of multiple small, self-powered and hardware-constrained sensors attached to, or eventually implanted into, the human body to provide a continuous monitoring of sensed parameters (e.g. temperature, ECG, heartbeat, positions and/or distances to other sensors, etc.) to a central node (or WBSN coordinator), for further data processing, decision making or data forwarding to external networks.
The design of effective network architectures and relaying mechanisms is thus crucial to achieve energy-efficient and low-latency end-to-end communications between the on-body sensors and the WBSN coordinator. Although recent research studies have been undertaken in this direction, the proposed solutions [1-5] do not fully exploit the inherent characteristics of wireless body area networks (e.g. body mobility, limbs movements, harsh radio propagation conditions [6-7], limited communication range, limited energy and computation capabilities, etc.). The goal of this internship is to investigate innovative relaying and routing mechanisms for wireless mobile body sensor networks under realistic radio channel and mobility conditions.

The first part of the work will consist in surveying the related works and providing a detailed bibliography overview on medium access control (MAC), network architectures and routing/relaying algorithms for wireless body area networks.

The second part of the training period will consist in the proposal of innovative relaying/routing mechanisms (at the network layer) for wireless body sensor networks to ensure energy efficiency, low latency and high data delivery ratio. The optimal and dynamic allocation of available resources (at the MAC layer) will also be considered while ensuring compliance with emerging standards (e.g. IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol [8], Bluetooth Low Energy, etc.).

The proposed network architectures, relaying mechanisms and MAC protocols will be evaluated through Matlab simulations with properly abstracted lower layers using, for example, already obtained narrowband and ultra wideband (UWB) WBSN radio channel measurements (e.g. SNR, PER, etc.).

Finally, depending on the progress of work, the implementation of the proposed relaying and routing mechanisms might be considered. To that end, the proposed algorithms could be implemented (using C/C++ language) on real hardware sensor nodes developed at CEA/LETI, and evaluated through experimental campaigns.

Advantageously, the investigations could benefit from previous research studies carried out at CEA/LETI in the scope of optimized MAC, Routing and Relaying protocols for wireless body area networks, WBSN radio channel measurements campaigns, WBSN testbeds, etc.