Multi-hop Wireless Body Area Network Design for WUSB support in Wireless Home Networks

The wireless universal serial bus (WUSB) connects personal computers (PCs) to their peripherals and the consumer-electronics (CE) in people’s living home networks. A wireless body area network (WBAN) allows the integration of intelligent, miniaturized, low-power sensor nodes that monitor body functions and the surrounding environment. In this paper, we propose a method for multi-hop network extension of WUSB over WBAN protocol. Unlike a wired USB that physically separates the USB host and USB device, WUSB allows a device to separately function as both a WUSB host and WUSB device on a single transceiver; such devices are referred to as the dual role devices (DRD). By using this DRD function of WUSB protocol, we propose a WUSB clustering method to realize the multi-hop network extension of WUSB over WBAN protocol in wireless home networks. In the WUSB clustering method, a new DRD message format to reserve 2-hop range private DRP (Distributed Reservation Protocol) resources. In the experiment results, efficiency of the WUSB clustering method is proven through throughput evaluation in viewpoints of medical and nonmedical multi-hop WBAN