Wireless body area networks (WBANs) provide medical and/or consumer electronics (CE) services within the vicinity of a human body. In a WBAN environment, immediate and reliable data transmissions during an emergency situation should be supported for medical services. In this letter, we propose a flexible emergency handling scheme for WBAN MAC protocols. The proposed scheme can be applied to superframe-structured MAC protocols such as IEEE 802.15.4 and its extended versions. In addition, our scheme can be incorporated into the current working draft for IEEE 802.15.6 standards. Extensive simulations were performed and the low latency of emergent traffics was validated.

WBANs provide communication services in the vicinity of the human body. Since WBANs utilize both MICS frequency band for implant medical applications and ISM frequency band for medical and consumer electronics (CE) applications, MAC protocols in WBAN should be designed considering flexibility between medical and CE applications. In this letter, we identify the requirements of WBAN MAC protocols and propose a WBAN MAC protocol which satisfies the requirements. In order to provide transmission flexibility for various applications, we present the dynamic CFP allocation and opportunity period. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves improved throughput and latency in WBAN environment compared with IEEE 802.15.4.

Reliable data transmission is desirable in wireless sensor networks due to the high packet loss rate during multi-hop transmissions. To reliably transmit data for event-driven applications, packet loss recovery mechanism is needed. For loss recovery, sensor nodes need to keep packets in their buffers until transmissions successfully complete. However, since sensor nodes have limited memory, packets cannot be buffered for a long period of time. This letter proposes an efficient buffer management technique that caches data packets for appropriate amount of time to minimize the resource requirements and at the same time provide reliable data transmission among sensor nodes.

Downlink multi-point transmission as a capacity enhancement method for the users at cell edge and the operators is studied in this paper. It is based on the so-called aggregate base station architecture using distributed antennas and cloud computing. Its advantages are analyzed by both its architectural side and simulation. The simulation results show that the capacity may be affected by the number of cell belonging to an aggregate base station and by the parameters related to the operation of it.

This paper discribes a shared medium access control protocol for residential home and small business customer ATM network application with distributed high-speed multimedia services. This protocol offers global fairness for the whole network with a CG (Centralized Grant) signal and, at the same time, offers local fairness between nodes with DG (Distributed Grant) signals. The DG signal is only meaningful to the next neighboring node. The local fairness is kept between two nodes in distributed way, but this distributed local fairness helps to keep the global fairness. Because the DG signal is related to the passed DG signal from the neighbor node. This protocol is rather simple but shows high performance than the already announced protocols.

In this paper, we propose an error-correction low-pass filter (EC-LPF) algorithm for estimating the wireless distance between devices. To measure this distance, the received signal strength indication (RSSI) is a popularly used method because the RSSI of a wireless signal, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, can be measured easily without the need for additional hardware. However, estimating the wireless distance using an RSSI is known to be difficult owing to the occurrence of inaccuracies. To examine the inaccuracy characteristics of Bluetooth RSSI, we conduct a preliminary test to discover the relationship between the actual distance and Bluetooth RSSI under several different environments. The test results verify that the main reason for inaccuracy is the existence of measurement errors in the raw Bluetooth RSSI data. In this paper, the EC-LPF algorithm is proposed to reduce measurement errors by alleviating fluctuations in a Bluetooth signal with responsiveness for real-time applications. To evaluate the effectiveness of the EC-LPF algorithm, distance accuracies of different filtering algorithms are compared, namely, a low-pass filer (LPF), a Kalman filter, a particle filter, and the EC-LPF algorithm under two different environments: an electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) chamber and an indoor hall. The EC-LPF algorithm achieves the best performance in both environments in terms of the coefficient of determination, standard deviation, measurement range, and response time. In addition, we also implemented a meeting room application to verify the feasibility of the EC-LPF algorithm. The results prove that the EC-LPF algorithm distinguishes the inside and outside areas of a meeting room without error.