An Experimental Testbed for Managing BAN Services at the Network Edge

In this article we investigate how to support Intraor On-Body Area Network (BAN) applications with strict delay requirements using a network edge architecture. By using an SDN/NFV approach integrated with a mobile system it is possible to transmit a multimedia stream generated inside the human body to a mobile device, which then relays the information to the cloud for further processing. Therefore, we propose an edge approach to reduce overheads, thus making the support of time-constrained medical applications feasible. The proposed architecture has been implemented in a real testbed and the performance of the system were assessed to prove its feasibility.