Section: Application Domains

Body Area Networks

Body Area Network is a relatively new paradigm which aims at promoting the development or wireless systems in, on and around the human body. Wireless Body Area Networks (ban ) is now a well known acronym which encompasses scenarios in which several sensors and actuators are located on or inside the human body to sense different data, e.g. physiological information, and transfer them wirelessly towards a remote coordination unit which processes, forwards, takes decisions, alerts, records, etc. The use of ban spans a wide area, from medical and health care to sport through leisure applications, which definitely makes the definition of a standard air interface and protocol highly challenging. Since it is expected that such devices and networks would have a growing place in the society and become more stringent in terms of quality of service, coexistence issues will be critical. Indeed, the radio resource is known to be scarce. The recent regulation difficulties of uwb systems as well as the growing interest for opportunistic radios show that any new system have to make an efficient use of the spectrum. This also applies to short range personal and body area network systems which are subject to huge market penetrations.

Socrate was involved in the Banet anr project (2008-2010), in which we contributed to the development of a complete phy /mac standard in cooperation with Orange Labs and cea Leti, who participated to the standardization group 802.15.6. Recently, Inria has been added as a partner the FET flagship untitled Guardian Angels (http://www.fet-f.eu/ ), an important european initiative to develop the ban s of the futur.

We consider that ban s will probably play an important role in the future of Internet as the multiple objects connected on body could also be connected to Internet by the mobile phone hosted by each human. Therefore the ban success really depends on the convergence of wsn and radio access networks, which makes it a very interesting applicative framework for Socrate team.