HUBsFLOW: A novel interface protocol for SDN-enabled WBANs
Abstract Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) concept is one of the most promising technologies for healthcare applications. In WBANs, sensor nodes are capable of sensing, gathering the human body signs and sending them to the HUB; the communication between nodes and HUB is called as intra-WBAN communications. Inter-WBAN communication manages all HUBs for communications of various WBANs. WBANs have inherently heterogeneous structures and limited energy sources, and also, installation/configuration network management processes are increasingly quite complex. New approaches are required to implement WBANs in order to overcome these challenges. We propose the Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach aims at constructing a flexible and manageable structure for inter-WBAN communications. Therefore, a new SDN-enabled WBAN architecture with HUBsFlow interface protocol is proposed in this paper. The proposed architecture provides a flexible, manageable, and an energy sensitive structure. Hence, a controller that is a key component for SDN undertakes all management and control processes about network. HUBsFlow interface protocol is utilized on the controller that provides the communications among the controller and HUBs in inter-WBAN communications. All components, protocols, and algorithms of the proposed architecture are developed and simulated using Riverbed Modeler software. Throughput, delay, packet loss ratio, bit error rate, and energy consumption parameters are taken into account for performance evaluation of the proposed architecture. The results show that the proposed architecture outperforms when comparing with traditional WBAN architecture and satisfies IEEE/ISO 11073 service quality requirements.