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Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been a key element in e-health to monitor bodies. This technology enables new applications under the umbrella of different domains, including the medical field, the entertainment and ambient intelligence areas. This survey paper places substantial emphasis on the concept and key features of theWBAN technology. First, the WBAN concept is introduced and a review of key applications facilitated by this networking technology is provided. The study then explores a wide variety of communication standards and methods deployed in this technology. Due to the sensitivity and criticality of the data carried and handled by WBAN, fault tolerance is a critical issue and widely discussed in this paper. Hence, this survey investigates thoroughly the reliability and fault tolerance paradigms suggested for WBANs. Open research and challenging issues pertaining to fault tolerance, coexistence and interference management and power consumption are also discussed along with some suggested trends in these aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current networking technologies are not perfectly equipped to support Quality of Service (QoS), which is vital for real-time multimedia applications in Wireless Community Mesh Networks (WCNs). Therefore, there is a need to devise innovative routing algorithms to support QoS on top of existing standards. Thus, this paper presents a cross layer relay node selection model for routing protocols in order to offer optimal routes to real-time applications. To the best of our knowledge, our two proposed routing metrics, Packet Priority-Oriented routing metric (PPO) and Packet Priority-oriented QoS routing metric (PP-QoS) , are the first to provide differentiated priorities and service levels to applications with different needs. PPO considers the application priority. Moreover, PP-QoS also considers the channel busy level to improve the performance of path selection. The simulation confirms the superiority of the proposed model against a number of existing counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless community networks (WCNs) have emerged as a cost-effective ubiquitous broadband connectivity solution, offering a wide range of services in a given geographical area. QoS-aware multicast over WCNs is among the most challenging issues and has attracted a lot of attention in recent times. The existing multicast schemes in WCNs suffer in terms of several key performance metrics, such as, latency, jitter and throughput, particularly in large-scale networks. Consequently, these schemes cannot accommodate the desired performance levels, especially when dealing with high-bandwidth applications that require efficient gateway-based management. To fill in this gap, a new strategy for supporting QoS-aware multicast in large-scale WCNs is proposed in this paper. Specifically, a new Gateway based Multi-hop Routing algorithm (GMR) is firstly proposed to enhance the routing management capability of the network. Built upon GMR, a new Multicast Gateway Multi-hop Routing algorithm (MGMR) is devised to cope with high-bandwidth applications in WCNs. The MGMR is the first of its kind that considers both the capability of gateway-based management and the requirements of high-bandwidth applications. Extensive simulation experiments and performance results demonstrate the superiority of both GMR and MGMR when compared to other methods under various operating conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a highly capable technology that can offer low-cost and easy-deployable network connectivity to both small-size community networks and large-scale metropolitan networks. As a key emerging technology to provide the next generation broadband networking, WMN combines the advantages of both mobile ad hoc network (MANET) and traditional fixed network, attracting significant industrial and academic attentions. In WMN, the load balancing has already shown its key role in enhancing communication quality by providing reduced latency, jitter and error rate as well as improving bandwidth utilisation and allocation polices. Although there are a number of proposals on using load-aware strategy in WMN, the neighbourhood load has not been considered within the context of load balancing and high efficient WMNs. In this paper, we propose a Neighbourhood Load Routing metric to further improve the performance of existing routing protocols such as AODV in WMN. We have conducted extensive simulation experiments and our results confirm the superiority of our proposed scheme over its well-known counterparts, especially in grid topologies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The increasing demand for the coverage of high-speed wireless local area networks (WLANs) is driving the installation of a very large number of access points (APs). Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising technology in the next generation networks to provide economical and scalable broadband access to wireless interconnection of multiple APs that manage individual WLANs in order to extend the coverage of the conventional single WLANs. In this paper, we develop a new analytical model to investigate the quality-of-service (QoS) performance metrics in WMNs interconnecting multiple WLANs. The model takes the phenomenon of communication locality into consideration. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to validate the accuracy of the analytical model. The proposed model is then used to obtain the maximum achievable throughput, which is a key performance metrics in wireless networks. Moreover, we utilize the model to evaluate the impact of communication locality on network performance and investigate its effects on the optimization of integrated WLANs and multi-hop mesh networks. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadcast is a fundamental operation used in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) for many services, such as route discovery and sending information messages. The direct method to perform broadcast is a simple flooding, which can decrease the performance of MANET. Recently, a probabilistic approach to flooding has been proposed as one of most important suggested solutions to solve the broadcast storm problem, which leads to the collision, contention and duplicated messages. This paper presents the Smart Probabilistic Broadcasting (SPB) as a new probabilistic method to improve the performance of existing on-demand routing protocols by reducing the RREQ overhead during the rout discovery operation. The simulation results show that the combination of AODV and a suitable probabilistic rout discovery can reduce the average end-to-end delay as well as overhead, while achieving low normalized routing load, compared to AODV that uses fixed probability and blind flooding. Simulation experiments have been conducted to examine our proposed scheme. The results show that SPB outperforms its counterparts and opens up a promising framework towards optimal probabilistic broadcasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the role based privacy-aware secure routing protocol (RPASRP), the security usage in wireless networks, and the problem of verifiable queries in sensor networks.

A new analytical model is proposed to investigate the delay and throughput in cognitive mesh networks. The validity of the model is demonstrated via extensive simulation experiments. The model is then used to evaluate the effects of the number of licensed channels and channel utilisation on the network performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to limited processing capabilities and other constraints of most wireless networks, many existing security algorithms do not consider the network efficiency. This is because most of these security solutions exhibit intolerable overhead and consider only securing scalar data, which are not suitable for other data types such as digital images, hence affecting the provided security level and network performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient security scheme based on chaotic algorithms to efficiently encrypt digital images. Our proposed algorithm handles digital images in two phases: Firstly, digital images are split into blocks and compressed by processing them in frequency domain instead of Red-Green-Blue (RGB) domain. The ultimate goal is to reduce their sizes to speed up the encryption process and to break the correlation among image pixel values. Secondly, 2D Logistic chaotic map is deployed in key generation, permutation, and substitution stages for image pixel shuffling and transposition. In addition, 2D Henon chaotic map is deployed to change the pixel values in the diffusion stage in order to enhance the required level of security and resist various security attacks. Security performance analysis based on standard test images shows that our proposed scheme overcomes the performance of other existing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]