The virtue of sharing: Efficient content delivery in Wireless Body Area Networks for ubiquitous healthcare

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) includes a set of body sensor nodes which are placed around human body, collecting data while sending them to medical center. In order to deliver the body signal to remote terminals in timely fashion, an extended communication architecture dubbed “beyond-BAN communication” was proposed. However, existing architectures are not suitable for the scenarios with high mobility of both patients and physicians due to the fluctuation of wireless links. Furthermore, when the amount of healthcare content is large, the quality of delivery is hard to be guaranteed. To address these challenging issues, we propose a novel network architecture, which integrates WBAN with the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networking and Named Data Networking (NDN). The integration with LTE is to enlarge the radio coverage and guarantee the quality of wireless transmissions, while the integration with NDN is to leverage edge router caching technique to enhance the capacity of the WBAN coordinator, and to avoid the packets loss by adapting to dynamic wireless link conditions with the adaptive streaming technique. The experimental results conducted by OPNET Modeler prove that our solution improves the Quality of Service (QoS) performance of WBAN transmission significantly.