Emerging wireless personal area networks(WPANs) : - An analysis of techniques, tools and threats

Wireless Personal Area Networks provide a pivotal role in local area network technology complementing traditional Wireless Local Area Network technologies. Bluetooth, ZigBee and NFC (Near Field Communications) have emerged as key WPAN technologies with UWB (Ultra Wide Band) standards currently evolving. They are however subject to the usual range of security vulnerabilities found in wireless LANs such as spoofing, snooping, man-in-the-middle, denial of service and other attacks. However security in WPANs is not as mature as it is in Wireless LANs and further work is needed in order to provide comparable protection. This paper examines a range of WPAN technologies and security issues and proposes protection mechanisms that can mitigate risk in each case. © 2012 IEEE.

Fuzzy logic optimized wireless sensor network routing protocol

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used in health monitoring, tracking and security applications. Such networks transfer data from specific areas to a nominated destination. In the network, each sensor node acts as a routing element for other sensor nodes during the transmission of data. This can increase energy consumption of the sensor node. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for improving network lifetime and performance. The proposed protocol uses type-2 fuzzy logic to minimize the effects of uncertainty produced by the environmental noise. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol performs better than a recently developed routing protocol in terms of extending network lifetime and saving energy and also reducing data packet lost.

Design and analysis of an antenna for wireless energy harvesting in head-mountable DBS device

This paper presents design and simulation of a circular meander dipole antenna at the industrial, scientific, and medical band of 915 MHz for energy scavenging in a passive head-mountable deep brain stimulation device. The interaction of the proposed antenna with a rat body is modeled and discussed. In the antenna, the radiating layer is meandered, and a FR-4 substrate is used to limit the radius and height of the antenna to 14 mm and 1.60 mm, respectively. The resonance frequency of the designed antenna is 915 MHz and the bandwidth of 15 MHz at a return loss of -10 dB in free space. To model the interaction of the antenna with a rat body, two aspects including functional and biological are considered. The functional aspect includes input impedance, resonance frequency, gain pattern, radiation efficiency of the antenna, and the biological aspect involves electric field distribution, and SAR value. A complete rat model is used in the finite difference time domain based EM simulation software XFdtd. The simulated results demonstrate that the specific absorption rate distributions occur within the skull in the rat model, and their values are higher than the standard regulated values for the antenna receiving power of 1W.

Design and analysis of efficient rectifiers for wireless power harvesting in DBS devices

This paper presents an analysis of optimum rectifier circuits for wireless energy harvesting in deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices. Since DBS demands compact and low power consumption devices, small, high conversion efficient, and high output voltage rectifiers need to be developed. The investigation that is presented in this paper is analytical and simulated based. Analysis on a variety of circuit configurations brings more evidence to improve the performance of rectifiers. Analytical parameters influencing the output DC voltage and the efficiency of the rectifiers are described. The operating frequency of the 915 MHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) radio band is used in this study. The maximum conversion efficiency of the LC matched half wave rectifier, the Greinacher voltage doubler, the Delon doubler, and the 2-stage voltage multiplier is obtained as 56.34%, 74.45%, 71.48%, and 31.44%, respectively, at the 30 dBm input power level. The corresponding maximum output DC voltages are 6.27 V, 16.83 V, 13.36 V, and 9.20 V. Thus the Greinacher voltage doubler is deemed as the best configuration according to the conversion efficiency and the output voltage measurements.