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.

Sensor network deployment is very challenging due to the hostile and unpredictable nature of environments. The field coverage of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be enhanced and consequently network lifetime can be prolonged by optimizing the sensor deployment with a finite number of mobile sensors. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive taxonomy for WSN self-deployment in which three sensor relocation algorithms are proposed to match the mobility degree of sensor nodes, particle swarm optimization based algorithm (PSOA), relay shift based algorithm (RSBA) and energy efficient fuzzy optimization algorithm (EFOA). PSOA regards the sensors in the network as a swarm, and reorganizes the sensors by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, in the full sensor mobility case. RSBA and EFOA assume relatively limited sensor mobility, i.e., the movement distance is bounded by a threshold, to further reduce energy consumption. In the zero mobility case, static topology control or scheduling schemes can be used such as optimal cluster formation. Simulation results show that our approaches greatly improve the network coverage as well as energy efficiency compared with related works.

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.

Ubiquitous sensor networks (USNs) are comprised of energy constrained nodes. This limitation has led to the crucial need for energy-aware protocols to produce an efficient network. We propose a sleep scheduling scheme for balancing energy consumption rates in a single hop cluster based network using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). We consider three factors contributing to the optimal nodes scheduling decision and they are the distance to cluster head (CH), residual energy, and sensing coverage overlapping, respectively. We also propose an integrated sleep scheduling and geographical multi-path routing scheme for USNs by AHP. The sleep scheduling is redesigned to adapt the multi-hop case. For the proposed routing protocol, the distance to the destination location, remaining battery capacity, and queue size of candidate sensor nodes in the local communication range are taken into consideration for next hop relay node selection. The proposed schemes are observed to improve network lifetime and conserve energy without compromising desired coverage. In the multi-hop case, it can further reduce the packet loss rate and link failure rate since the buffer capacity is considered.

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.

In this paper, we investigate the critical low coverage problem of position aware localized efficient broadcast in mobile ad hoc ubiquitous sensor networks and propose a generic framework for it. The framework is to determine a small subset of nodes and minimum transmission radiuses based on snapshots of network state (local views) along the broadcast process. To guarantee the accuracy of forward decisions, based on historical location information nodes will predict neighbors' positions at future actual transmission time and then construct predicted and synchronized local views rather than simply collect received "Hello" messages. Several enhancement technologies are also proposed to compensate the inaccuracy of prediction and forward decisions. To verify the effectiveness of our framework we apply existing efficient broadcast algorithms to it. Simulation results show that new algorithms, which are derived from the generic framework, can greatly increase the broadcast coverage ratio.

Energy efficient routing is one of the key design issues to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) since sensor nodes can not be easily re-charged once they are deployed. During routing process, the routes with only few hops or with too many hops are not energy efficient. Hop-based routing algorithms can largely improve the energy efficiency of multi-hop routing in WSNs because they can determine the optimal hop number as well as the corresponding intermediate nodes during multi-hop routing process under medium or high density network. In this paper, we not only focus on studying the relationship between energy consumption and hop number from theoretical point of view but also provide a practical selection criterion of the sub-optimal hop number under practical sensor network so as to minimize the energy consumption. We extend the theoretical deduction of optimal hop number and propose our Hop-based Energy Aware Routing (HEAR) algorithm which is totally distributed and localized. Simulation results show that our HEAR algorithm can reduce the average energy consumption about 10 times compared to the direct transmission algorithm and 2 to 10 times than other algorithms like LEACH and HEED under various network topologies.