ORIGINAL PAPER Seamless Interworking Architecture for WBAN in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with QoS Guarantees Pervez Khan & Niamat Ullah & Sana Ullah & Kyung Sup Kwak Received: 19 December 2010 / Accepted: 6 July 2011 / Published online: 16 July 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract The IEEE 802.15.6 standard is a communication standard optimized for low-power and short-range in-body/ on-body nodes to serve a variety of medical, consumer electronics and entertainment applications. Providing high mobility with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) to a WBAN user in heterogeneous wireless networks is a challenging task. A WBAN uses a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to gather data from body sensors and forwards it to a remote server through wide range wireless networks. In this paper, we present a coexistence study of WBAN with Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWANs). The main issue is interworking of WBAN in heterogenous wireless networks including seamless handover, QoS, emergency services, cooperation and security. We propose a Seamless Inter- working Architecture (SIA) for WBAN in heterogenous wireless networks based on a cost function. The cost function is based on power consumption and data through- put costs. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms typical approaches in terms of throughput, delay and packet loss rate. Keywords WBAN . WLAN . WiMAX . QoS Introduction A wireless sensor network is a collection of cooperative nodes using wireless links to perform a distributed sensing task. These nodes are typically provided with an embedded microprocessor and a very small amount of memory. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being applied in many areas, such as medical monitoring, emergency response, security, industrial automation, environment and agriculture, seismic detection, infrastructure protection and optimization, automotive and aeronautic applications, building automation, and military applications [1]. Wireless sensor networking has opened up new opportunities in healthcare systems by enhancing the quality of life provided for the patients and also the quality of healthcare services [2]. In such networks different kinds of sensors are attached on clothing or on the body or even implanted under the skin. For example, patients need not be physically present at the physician clinic for their routine diagnostic check if they are equipped with Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN has shown to be adequate for emergency cases, where it continuously sends patient’ s information to a remote server or physician to maintain optimum health status. When integrated in a telemedicine system, it also allows physician and emergency medical technician staff (Nurses and Technicians) to predict or even treat life-threatening diseases [3, 4]. This technology is expected to reduce the amount of time doctors require to identify the problem, the amount of paper work required and eliminates the duplication of patient records. Figure 1 shows a conceptual view of WBAN. At the end of 2007, IEEE launched a new task group on WBAN [5] known as IEEE 802.15.6. The purpose of the group is to establish a communication standard optimized for low-power and short-range in-body/on-body nodes to P. Khan (*) : N. Ullah : S. Ullah : K. S. Kwak Graduate School of Information and Communication Engineering, Inha University, Incheon 402-751, South Korea e-mail: pervaizkanju@hotmail.com N. Ullah e-mail: niamatnaz@gmail.com S. Ullah e-mail: sanajcs@hotmail.com K. S. Kwak e-mail: kskwak@inha.ac.kr J Med Syst (2011) 35:1313–1321 DOI 10.1007/s10916-011-9756-4