Integration of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and WAN, WiMAX and LTE

Abstract

Nowadays, wireless communication has a great advantage in technology. We use wireless devices almost in all expected life such as: entertainment, working and recently in the healthcare area, where Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) become a hot topic for researchers and system designers. Recent work on WBANs focus on related issues to communication protocol, especially ZigBee network is fine tuned to meet particular requirements in healthcare area. For example, some papers present real-time patient monitoring via ZigBee communication given the short distance between body sensors and remote devices, while the other work solve the limited coverage problem of Zigbee by designing mechanisms to relay Zigbee data to other types of wire or wireless infrastructure. However, very few of them investigate the scenarios of ZigBee coexisting or integrated with other networks. In this paper, we present the real-time data transmission from ZigBee end devices to Wide Area Network (WAN), Worldwide interoperation for microwave access network (WiMAX) and Long Term Evolution network (LTE). We provide in detail the ZigBee gateway components. Our simulation is conducted by OPNET, we visualize many topology network scenarios in ZigBee hybrid system. The results in simulation show that ZigBee end devices can successfully transmit data in real-time to other network end devices.