The software defined networking (SDN) paradigm promises to dramatically simplify network configuration and resource management. Such features are extremely valuable to network operators and therefore, the industrial (besides the academic) research and development community is paying increasing attention to SDN. Although wireless equipment manufacturers are increasing their involvement in SDN-related activities, to date there is not a clear and comprehensive understanding of what are the opportunities offered by SDN in most common networking scenarios involving wireless infrastructureless communications and how SDN concepts should be adapted to suit the characteristics of wireless and mobile communications. This paper is a first attempt to fill this gap as it aims at analyzing how SDN can be beneficial in wireless infrastructureless networking environments with special emphasis on wireless personal area networks (WPAN). Furthermore, a possible approach (called SDWN) for such environments is presented and some design guidelines are provided.

The use of wirelessly internetworked miniaturized biomedical devices is promising a significant leap forward in medical treatment of many pervasive diseases. Recognizing the limitations of traditional radio-frequency wireless communications in interconnecting devices within the human body, in this paper, we propose for the first time to develop network protocols for implantable devices based on ultrasonic transmissions. We start off by assessing the theoretical feasibility of using ultrasonic waves in human tissues and by deriving an accurate channel model for ultrasonic intrabody communications. Then, we propose a new ultrasonic transmission and multiple access technique, which we refer to as Ultrasonic WideBand (UsWB). UsWB is based on the idea of transmitting information bits spread over very short pulses following a time-hopping pattern. The short impulse duration results in limited reflection and scattering effects, and the low duty cycle reduces the impact of thermal and mechanical effects, which may be detrimental for human health. We then develop a multiple access technique with distributed control to enable efficient simultaneous access by mutually interfering devices based on minimal and localized information exchange and on measurements at the receiver only. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of UsWB through a multiscale simulator that models the proposed communication system at the acoustic wave level, at the physical (bit) level, and at the network (packet) level. We also validate the simulation results by comparing them to experimental results obtained with a software-defined testbed.

Microfluidics deals with manipulation and control of fluids which flow in constrained sub-millimetric media. In this paper communication concepts and networking approaches, typical of telecommunications, are extended to the microfluidic domain. The work illustrated in this paper investigates on possible approaches to information encoding and evaluation of the corresponding channel capacity as well as design of switching solutions. Based on the results of this study, the Hydrodynamic Controlled Microfluidic Network (HCN) paradigm is proposed, which is based on a pure hydrodynamic microfluidic switching function. The HCN paradigm can be applied to interconnect Labs-on-a-Chip (LoCs) in a microfluidic network in which chemical/biological samples are routed between the LoCs by exploiting hydrodynamic effects only. The resulting LoCs are expected to be highly flexible and inexpensive, and thus to become extremely useful in chemical/biological analysis and synthesis.

Body area networks (BANs) promise to enable revolutionary biomedical applications by wirelessly interconnecting devices implanted or worn by humans. However, BAN wireless communications based on radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic waves suffer from poor propagation of signals in body tissues, which leads to high levels of attenuation. In addition, in-body transmissions are constrained to be low-power to prevent overheating of tissues and consequent death of cells. To address the limitations of RF propagation in the human body, we propose a paradigm shift by exploring the use of ultrasonic waves as the physical medium to wirelessly interconnect in-body implanted devices. Acoustic waves are the transmission technology of choice for underwater communications, since they are known to propagate better than their RF counterpart in media composed mainly of water. Similarly, we envision that ultrasound (e.g., acoustic waves at non-audible frequencies) will provide support for communications in the human body, which is composed for 65% of water. In this paper, we first assess the feasibility of using ultrasonic communications in intra-body BANs, i.e., in-body networks where the devices are biomedical sensors that communicate with an actuator/gateway device located inside the body. We discuss the fundamentals of ultrasonic propagation in tissues, and explore important tradeoffs, including the choice of a transmission frequency, transmission power, bandwidth, and transducer size. Then, we discuss future research challenges for ultrasonic networking of intra-body devices at the physical, medium access and network layers of the protocol stack.