Body Sensor Networks for Healthcare and Pervasive Applications

We are currently witnessing a growing interest in the area of wireless body area networking (WBAN) accompanied by the strong demand of the medical and healthcare society as well as by the advances in low-power micro- and nano-electronics and wireless networking. Consumers and doctors envisage an era where mobile health monitoring systems will work seamlessly and in concert to eliminate the lag time between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis. To this end WBAN can assert a key contribution, but as it shows particular characteristics when compared to traditional wireless sensor and ad hoc networks, it can introduce several new research challenges.

The aim of this special issue is to collect the recent advances on BANs for healthcare and pervasive applications. We are inviting the submission of original and unpublished work addressing several areas of wireless BAN. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following issues:

•    Antenna design for in- and on-body networks
•    Channel modeling radio propagation issues for BAN
•    Electromagnetic Radiation and Human tissues
•    Interference management and mitigation
•    Coexistence of BAN with other wireless technologies
•    Protocols and algorithms for the PHY, MAC and Network Layer
•    End-to-end QoS provision for BAN
•    Energy efficient and low-power consumption protocols
•    Power management for BAN
•    Machine-to-machine for BAN
•    Integration of BAN with heterogeneous networks
•    Lightweight security, authentication and cryptography solutions for BAN
•    Modeling and simulation in BAN
•    Context Awareness in BAN
•    Energy Harvesting for BAN
•    Real life experimental platforms, prototypes and pilot studies
•    Personal devices for monitoring and trending for disease detection, progression, remission, and fitness
•    Recent standardization activities for BAN
•    Regulatory issues

Dr. Christos Verikoukis
Guest Editor