The burgeoning cost of healthcare has forced industry experts and academics to rethink current healthcare systems. There is a compelling argument that the increasing costs are primarily due to the fundamentally reactionary approach used in healthcare today, with the focus being on treatment and cure rather than on prevention. Consequently, building a sustainable healthcare system requires a paradigm shift towards a proactive prevention based approach. A critical requirement of such a system is the ubiquitous collection of and access to patient physiological data. Both real-time and historical analysis of this data is the basis of a preventive healthcare system. To this end, we are developing a pervasive real-time health monitoring framework to seamlessly connect both patients and healthy people to healthcare professionals. In this paper, we present the design of this framework, which is intended to be lightweight, agile and scalable. The design primarily utilizes a resource-oriented architecture (ROA) based RESTful HTTP to connect wireless biosensors, wireless networks and a cloud computing platform. The paper also discusses a proof-of-concept implementation of the framework that demonstrates the effectiveness of the technology choices made in achieving the required design goals.

The activity around the standardization of an IEEE 802.11 mesh protocol has gained momentum in recent years. The mesh architecture presents a huge potential for multiple device-to-device communication, which will likely be realized through multi-channel access techniques. Prior studies on multi-channel access focus on routing and media access control (MAC) layers and are limited primarily to analysis and simulation. In this paper, we present the application of a novel approach called distributed information sharing (DISH) to provide a simple multi-channel access solution for 802.11 mesh networks. We present a cooperative multi-channel access extension of the 802.11 MAC protocol by incorporating DISH into the IEEE 802.11 DCF design and implement the protocol using commodity 802.11 hardware and open source Linux drivers. The paper also presents protocol design considerations, implementation challenges and experimental results from a mesh testbed. The study clearly demonstrates the performance superiority of the technique under heavy traffic conditions and confirms that cooperative multi-channel access is a promising technology for boosting the performance of 802.11 mesh networks.

Cooperation in wireless networks has shown significant performance gains in comparison to legacy wireless networks. Cooperative wireless protocols achieve such efficiency by enabling cooperation among nodes to exploit spatial diversity. CoopMAC is a medium access control (MAC) protocol that enables cooperation by using an intermediate node as a helper to a direct communication under poor channel conditions. The helper is typically located in a position where it experiences a good channel with both the source and destination. Therefore, it increases the efficiency of the communication by forwarding a packet from the source to the destination using high transmission rates. In an earlier attempt, we demonstrated the benefits of cooperation at the MAC layer by implementing the CoopMAC protocol using an open source wireless driver platform. However, due to some limitations posed by the hardware, the full potential of the protocol could not be explored. In this paper, we proceed with a complete implementation of the cooperative MAC protocol using an OFDM based software defined radio (SDR) platform. We investigate the benefits of the SDR approach, describe the details of the implementation, as well as the experiments we run in order to evaluate the protocol. Experimental results show that CoopMAC can easily be implemented and can lead to a significant improvement in the performance of wireless networks.