Design
Considerations
for
a
Wireless
Sensor
Network
Architecture
Attached
to
a
Cognitive
Training
System
for
the
Elderly
Bruno Salgues, Jorge A. Pardiñas‐Mir Télécom TIC et Santé, Institut Mines‐Télécom, France
THE INTERNATIONAL eHEALTH,
TELEMEDICINE AND HEALTH ICT FORUM For Education, Networking and Business
This work is part of a e‐Health system project
dedicated to the training and therapeutic
cognitive care of the elderly people.
The project is conducted in partnership with:
• ALTERA‐GROUP (Project manager, Paris‐Montpellier) • LIRMM (CNRS ‐ Laboratoire d'Informatique, de
Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier) • INSTITUT TELECOM ‐ TIC & SANTÉ (Montpellier)
3
We are working on a e-health system that offers a set of available home services for active seniors or elderly people affected or threatened by neuro-degenerative diseases as the Alzheimer’s disease, promoting improved quality of older people’s life through preventive and therapeutic actions.
It provides a set of specially designed activities to exercise the cognitive capacities of patients.
At the base of the system there’s a touch computing device connected to the Internet (a tablet), easy to use, through which all activities are carried out and the patient’s information and progress is remotely managed at the system’s site.
Some activities:
• Reading newspapers.
• Watching videos
• Playing educational and therapeutic games
(serious games).
5
System’s
Usage
Scenarios
The system can be used by the patient himself, at home, or with the assistance of others like friends or family. The patient may even benefit from the remote assistance of a tutor.
Cloud
Architecture
Benefits
The use of a cloud architecture allows the system to start small and increase software and hardware resources only when needed, specifically:
• The resources and users’ capacities can be increased without limitation and according to the real demand.
• Applications hosted in the Cloud can be run in the Cloud itself from a low-level client computing device.
• Centralized storage of patient’s health information that can be accessed from anywhere by the authorized personal.
The addition of a wireless sensor network
could bring valuable data related to the
patient’s health and his environment and it
can evolve according to particular needs.
7
Added Network’s Main Features
• Start with basic variables such as room
temperature and vital signs, but easily
allowing the addition of other parameters.
• Growing capacity in a compatible way,
both in physical and management
aspects.
• Able to distinguish data from different
users from the same network.
• Able to joint other wireless networks in
the same physical building.
9
General
Sensor
Networks
Characteristics
• Communication in wireless sensor networks occurs at low rate.
• Energy consumption must be guaranteed to rest at a low level.
• Support of nodes mobility and resulting topology changes.
• Necessity to deal with the unreliability characterizing wireless links.
While problems are deep-rooted in the classical Wireless Sensor Network architecture, where all nodes possesses all sensor and networking functionalities, Software Defined Networking can bring a good level of abstraction, allowing the programmability of the network and its evolution and management, taking into account that:
Wireless
Sensor
Networks
Problems
• Resource underutilization. One single and versatile network could be used instead of multiple networks deployed for different applications in the same terrain.
• Counter-productivity. Prototyping and production is delayed because of lack of reusing common functionalities that could be shared between different vendors.
• Rigidity to policy changes.
• Management difficulty. Being the development of a global network management system for distributed WSN a demanding task.
11
OpenFlow
Software
Definition
Networking
We propose to adopt the OpenFlow based SDN implementation in the WSN architecture:
• The Data Plane consists of sensors that also perform flow-based packet forwarding.
• The Control Plane centralizes the network control. • The sensor application lies at the applications
layer without taking care of the physical
Wireless
Sensors
Networks
Transformation
OpenFlow based SDN implementation helps
transform Wireless Sensors Networks into networks that are:
• Versatile. They can support multiple applications in a plug-and-play way; sensors are no longer
application-dependent but
application-customizable.
• Flexible. Easy to enforce policy changes
throughout the entire network.
• Easy to manage. Building an network
management system is no different from adding another application on top of the control plane, using open programming interfaces (APIs).
13
SDN
in
Wireless
Sensors
Networks
Many proposals promoting the use of open architecture for WSN based on Software Defined Networking:
• Software-Defined WSN (SD-WSN): featuring a clear separation between a data and a control plane. It defines Sensor OpenFlow (SOF) as a communication protocol between the two planes.
• SDWN: Software Defined Wireless Networking.
Differentiating generic nodes, with limited
computing/energy capabilities, from sink nodes, who executes the network controller, with much more computing/communication capabilities.
• OpenFlow in Wireless Mesh Networks: OpenFlow enabled mesh routers and mesh gateways, and the use of NOX (Open-Flow based Network Operative System) as the network controller.
Conclusions
• The addition of a wireless sensor network to the cognitive training system must guarantee a future easy scalability and manageability of the network.
• This can be achieved by the application of the Software-defined Networking paradigm to Wireless Sensor Networks but in such a way that it considers the special features of this kind of network in order to obtain an efficient performance.
15
Conclusions
• The adaptation must primarily take into account the low-rate data and low energy consumption characteristics of Wireless Sensor Networks.
• There are already some Wireless Sensor Networks proposals that show that it is convenient and possible to adapt the SDN paradigm to WSNs.
• This is an efficient architecture to be used in the design of a wireless sensor network for the cognitive training system.
Design
Considerations
for
a
Wireless
Sensor
Network
Architecture
Attached
to
a
Cognitive
Training
System
for
the
Elderly
Bruno Salgues, Jorge A. Pardiñas‐Mir
Télécom TIC et Santé, Institut Mines‐Télécom, France / Iteso University, Mexico
