NDNC-BAN: Supporting rich media healthcare services via named data networking in cloud-assisted wireless body area networks

Nowadays, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is broadly utilized for health monitoring and remote medical care. When the physiological information collected in WBAN is distributed to cloud computing platform, a new healthcare service mode is enabled by "cloud-assisted WBAN", where user's body signals can be stored, processed, managed and analyzed over a long-term period. Though the provisioning of healthcare services is largely enhanced via cloud-enabled technologies, more challenging issues are raised due to the increased user's requirements on quality of experience (QoE) in terms of user mobility, content delivery latency, and personalized interaction, etc. In order to tackle these challenges, this paper presents various solutions including: (1) a novel integration of WBAN with Long Term Evolution (LTE) to support high user mobility; (2) an efficient scheme to distribute contents by leveraging the emerging named data networking (NDN) technology, to support rich media healthcare content delivery without service interruption while achieving low cost and bandwidth saving; (3) the use of adaptive streaming to adjust suitable content size according to the dynamic bandwidth. The experimental results conducted by OPNET verify the viability of NDN and adaptive streaming to support the healthcare services involving the transmissions of rich media contents between WBAN and internet. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.