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Body Area Networks for Interactive Wireless Environments
Investigators: Séan Heaney, Emi Garcia & William Scanlon
This project will focus on cross-layer solutions for dynamic wireless body area networks for emerging applications where personnel are required to interact with their local environment. In these applications, the operation of the body area network (BAN) requires changes not just at the physical layer (e.g., reconfigurable mode-switched antennas), but throughout the entire protocol stack.
The research will be aimed at developing new ideas at the physical, link and network layers. This investigation could give further significant benefits for BAN, creating potential applications that would allow for seamless interaction with the user's environment. It would mean that BAN could not only see existing networks but efficiently and quickly transform its physical, link and network layers to allow for the BAN to join the existing network without disruption and become part of it as well being able to leave the network with potential adaption once again in joining onto another network as it leaves this environment and move to another. This could see potential benefits in commercial, military and medical applications.
Use of this technology may also provide an alternative to Wireless Bridge technologies, allowing devices to seamless join to existing networks to become one network reducing hardware complexity within the network and improving the overall functionality of a wireless network.
Investigation Topics
- Initial measurement and analysis, both physical and link layer channel measurements for
- body to body (BBN) scenarios
- body to local environment (e.g., office workspace or vehicle) scenarios
- Design and Implementation of suitable network protocol
- Investigation of channel characteristics for network merging and splitting with a view to predictive re-configuration based on physical or link layer statistics
Support
This project is funded by the Department of Employment and Learning (DEL), Northern Ireland.
More Information
Download a flyer for this project here.