Interconnection of body area networks to a communications infrastructure: An architectural study

Many papers in the literature advocate the use of the Internet of Things communication paradigm to connect wearable body area networks with the Internet in order to create a global communication framework for electronic health care management. In this paper we analyze some of the most typical deployment layouts by extracting them from the health care use case of the IoT-A project. In particular, we focus our investigation on the transition phase happening during network topology changes; in fact, during these events it is challenging to satisfy such functional requirements as promptness and availability. Moreover, we take into account how open standard communication protocols such as 6LoWPAN and RPL behave during device mobility and network handover; we highlight issues and propose some simple yet feasible strategies to improve the body area network performance during such events.