CSE Lecturer Candidate Seminar: IPv6, IoT and Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications

The Internet Protocol (IP) is responsible for routing of Internet content from its source to its destination. The talk would focus

on the fundamentals of IP, and then discuss its new avatar, IPv6 which is all set to make the Internet of Things a possibility in

near future.

Under the broad scheme of the Internet of Things, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are envisioned as low-power

Personal Area Networks. The WBANs involve sensor nodes (SNs) responsible for sensing and relaying physiological and

biokinetic data to a central station over a network involving wired and wireless links. WBANs are relatively new and are

evolving.

The limited energy budget in WBANs necessitates energy conservation to prolong the network lifetime. We have tried to

address the issues related to improvement of the lifetime of a WBAN, given the small sizes of the sensor nodes (SNs) mounted

on or inside human bodies in such a network and the limited battery power that the SNs run on.

We have also attempted to evaluate the behavior of a WBAN in the presence of other WBANs around it and check the issues

that all such WBANs would face. Wireless systems can face severe interference problems if two such systems try to use the

same communication channels at the same time. There could also be issues related to data routing because the nature of the

data involved can make it critical to have assured communication of information to the other end. We have also tried to use

interference to the benefit of WBANs and suggested a framework in which neighboring WBANs communicate with each other

for cooperative packet routing.

Although wireless systems have earned the trust about conveying data containing qualitative and quantitative information

reliably but their use for control applications has just started gaining popularity. We have evaluated the performance of

wireless control for entertainment applications and are trying to probe their feasibility in more critical real life applications.
Amitabh Mishra is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and

Computing Sciences, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH USA. Amitabh has 17 years of experience in teaching

undergraduate and graduate courses in universities in India and in the US. Amitabh has also worked in the process industry for

6 years. He is working towards his Ph.D. on the issues realted to wireless body area networks and on wireless control, under

the supervision of Dr. Dharma P. Agrawal in the Center for Distributed and Mobile Computing at UC College of Engineering

and Applied Sciences.