WBAN - Middleware, PI: Dr Simon Bao, I²R

The Body Area Network (BAN) platform comprises a number of wireless sensor nodes and a body gateway. It is a distributed system with various hardware configurations and operating systems. For each application, the developer has to deal with the specific sensor nodes, write programs for each sensor nodes as well as the gateway. When there are very limited resources (e.g. storage, bandwidth, power) and very few debugging supporting tools, it is both difficult and time consuming for the application development. And it is even more difficult and time consuming for code re-use or transplant from one application to another.

The role of middleware is to provide an abstraction layer between applications and the underlying platforms so as to simplify the application development, and make codes re-usable from one application to another. A common set of service API should be provided by the middleware so as to make application development faster and easier. In the case of BAN, the middleware should also make the distributed nature of BAN completely transparent to the applications.  The following figure illustrates the role that the middleware plays in the BAN platform.

The research issues in BAN middleware are:

a. New middleware architecture that support distributed data request under the constraint of very limited system resources.

b. New methods of data modeling, service definition and service discovery.

c. Constructing a set of highly reusable software components that  implement the following services:

●   Sensor – Dynamic body sensor nodes plug and play, sensor node localization and sensor calibration.

●  Communication – Time synchronization for all body sensor nodes, reliable data driven communication between sensor nodes and the gateway, and light weight security for body area sensor networks.

●  System – Scheduling and parsing data acquisition tasks, managing the distributed database, and reconfiguration for variations of application, resources and environments.