BAN Architecture Analysis

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Introduction
Body area networks (BAN) are a form of wireless personal area network (WPAN) and it has recently been accepted as 4th generation mobile communications systems taking the form of human to human networking incorporating wearable sensors and communication. BAN is normally thought of as wireless sensor networks (WSN) however in this paper we try to elaborate on how BAN works. BAN can take various forms, it incorporates the use of sensors which can be found in, on or around the body and it uses different types of communication. In the following section we shall elaborate on the specific communication architecture used by BAN.
Communication Architecture (by Ivy Wainaina)
The BAN communication architecture is divided into 3 tiers namely:
• Tier 1 – Intra-Ban communication design
• Tier 2 – Inter-Ban communication design
• Tier 3 – Beyond-Ban communication design
As shown in the image below, it depicts an example of a BAN implementation.

Figure 1: BAN 3-tier communication architecture.

Intra-BAN communication design
It handles communication between body sensors and the communication between the sensors with the personal server (PS). The design of this layer is critical as the sensors are battery-operated and have low bit rates thus it’s important that there is an energy-efficient MAC protocol with QoS provisioning.
The connection between the sensors and PS can be wired or wireless. In wired they use MIThril and SMART to connect the sensors to the PS. MIThril is a wearable computing platform that is used to monitor a user’s physiological state and the surrounding environment in real time. In wireless they use CodeBlue to connect the sensors directly to the access points.

Topologies implemented are star and mesh. In a star...

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... (IOT), the use of BAN is exponentially increasing in the society from clothing, shoes, body implants and other wearable sensors. The BAN is able to link to WSN as shown in figure 7 below. For example, a patient with chronic illnesses such as heart disease, liver and kidney failure might have sensors placed in or on their body and in the environment around them such as chairs or bed. In this instance, if they happen to have a cardiac arrest the in body sensor will relay this information to the doctors furthermore with the integration to WSN the doctor is able to determine the exact location of the patient (the chair). The challenge to engineers especially in developing countries is to come up with tailored uses of BAN, bearing in mind the timely transmission and synchronization of data from the various sensors is crucial in the use of BAN.

Figure 7: IOT and BAN

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