Special Issue of Information Sciences on Cloud-Assisted Wireless Body Area
Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology
for medical and non-medical applications. WBANs consist of a number of
miniaturized, portable, and autonomous sensor nodes that are used to
monitor the body function and the surrounding environment. These sensor
nodes continuously collect vital signs of patients, which are used for
ubiquitous health monitoring including real-time diagnosis and
prescription. In addition, WBANs may be used for managing catastrophic
events and increasing the effectiveness and performance of rescue forces.
Other potential applications include interactive gaming, social computing,
entertainment, and military applications. The huge amount of data collected
by WBAN nodes demands scalable, on-demand, powerful, and secure storage and
processing infrastructure. Cloud computing is expected to play a
significant role in achieving the aforementioned objectives. The cloud
computing environment links different devices ranging from miniaturized
sensor nodes to high-performance supercomputers for delivering
people-centric and context-centric services to the individuals and
industries. The possible integration of WBANs with cloud computing
(WBAN-cloud) will introduce viable and hybrid platform that must be able to
process the huge amount of data collected from multiple WBANs. This
WBAN-cloud will enable users (including physicians and nurses) to globally
access the processing and storage infrastructure at competitive costs.
Because WBANs forward useful and life-critical information to the cloud –
which may operate in distributed and hostile environments, novel security
mechanisms are required to prevent malicious interactions to the storage
infrastructure. Both the cloud providers and the users must take strong
security measures to protect the storage infrastructure.

The aim of this special issue is to invite high quality unpublished
research articles in the development of cloud computing environments for
WBANs, articulate new perspectives, and highlight open issues and
challenges. Particulary, this special issue will show the most recent
advancements in WBAN-cloud computing domain. Original review and survey
articles in this area will be appreciated. Topics of interest include, but
are not limited to:

  - Cloud computing algorithms for resource allocation
  - Fault tolerance and reliability
  - Scalability in processing and storage infrastructure
  - Models for supporting mobility in WBAN-cloud environment
  - Cloud monitoring and maintenance
  - Traffic and load balancing in the WBAN-cloud environment
  - Security and privacy

*Submission Guidelines*

All manuscripts should be submitted through Elsevier Editorial System
(EES). The authors must select as “cloud-assisted wireless body area
networks” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission
process. The EES website is located at: http://www.ees.elsevier.com/ins

*Important Dates:*
Paper submission:July. 1, 2013Review notification:Nov. 1, 2013Revision:Jan.
1, 2014Final acceptance notification:Feb. 25, 2014Publication:Mid-2014

*Editor-in-Chief*

*Prof. Witold Pedrycz*
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta
Electrical and Computer Engineering Research Facility, Edmonton, T6G 2V4,
Canada
Email: pedrycz@ualberta.ca

*Guest Editors*

*Prof. Athanasios Vasilakos*
Department of Computer Science, Kuwait University, Kuwait
Email: vasilako@ath.forthnet.gr

*Prof. Han-Chieh Chao*
College of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
National Ilan University, I-Lan, Taiwan
Email: hcchao@gmail.com

*Dr. Sana Ullah*
College of Computer and Information Science, King Saud University, Riyadh
Email: sullah@ksu.edu.sa

*Prof. Jun Suzuki*
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Email: jxs@cs.umb.edu
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