Design and evaluation of lightweight middleware for personal wireless body area network

This paper presents a lightweight middleware to be used for wireless medical body area networks. The middleware is designed to reside in mobile devices, and acts as a gateway to receive sensor data as well as to control a set of sensor devices attached to the wearer. The main essence of the middleware is to simplify and accelerate the development of wireless healthcare applications by providing highly reusable codes. The architecture of the middleware including its main functions such as data acquisition, dynamic plug-and-play capabilities, on-the-fly sensor reconfiguration, and resource management (i.e., sensor sleep/wake-up, critical self-wake) will be discussed. A security feature as a means to protect critical sensor data from malicious/unauthorized parties has also been incorporated in our proposed middleware. The prototype system of the middleware has been built and is presented in this paper together with its performance measurements.