Body Area Networking: Selected Papers from IEEE PIMRC 2009 Kamran Sayrafian-Pour • Kamya Yekeh Yazdandoost Received: 31 October 2010 / Accepted: 2 November 2010 / Published online: 9 December 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC (outside the USA) 2010 Abstract Body Area Networks (BAN) which consist of RF-enabled wearable and implantable sensory nodes are poised to be a promising interdisciplinary technology with novel uses in pervasive healthcare, personal entertainment and consumer electronics. The papers which appear in this special issue have been carefully selected from the best IEEE PIMRC 2009 conference papers addressing some of the most challenging issues in BAN such as propagation modeling, physical, and medium access control layers. Papers presented here propose models, algorithms and protocols exhibiting advance research in this promising field. Body Area Networks (BAN) which consist of RF-enabled wearable and implantable sensory nodes are poised to be a promising interdisciplinary technology with novel uses in pervasive healthcare, personal entertainment and consumer electronics. Radio-enabled implantable sensor nodes offer a revolutionary set of applications among which we can point to smart pills for precision drug delivery, glucose monitors and eye pressure sensing systems. Similarly, wearable sensor nodes offer an attractive set of applications such as medical/physiological monitoring (e.g. electrocar- diogram, temperature, respiration, heart rate, blood pres- sure), disability assistance and human performance management. Integration of BAN with the existing infor- mation infrastructure will create a truly pervasive envi- ronment for many of these critical applications with great impact on improving the quality of life. Some recent advances in microelectronics indicate that the technology to achieve ultra-small, and ultra low power devices for these applications are within reach. However, numerous technical challenges including energy efficiency, trans- ceiver design, reliability, co-existence, biocompatibility, and security issues still need to be resolved. The papers which appear in this special issue have been carefully selected from the best IEEE PIMRC 2009 con- ference papers addressing some of the challenging issues in BAN. In fact, two of the papers selected for this special issue won the best paper awards from their respective geographical regions at the conference. The invited authors have been asked to provide a significantly extended version of the respective conference paper, which has subsequently undergone a rigorous review process according to the IJ- WIN publication standards prior to acceptance. The final set of papers addresses issues on propagation modeling, physical, and medium access control layers of BAN. Papers presented here propose models, algorithms and protocols exhibiting advance research in this promising field. We sincerely hope you enjoy reading the interesting research works presented here. The authors of the first paper ‘‘A Statistical Model for On-Body Dynamic Channels’’ present a dynamic on-body channel model based on an extensive time-variant mea- surement campaign at 2.45 GHz and UWB band. In their experiments, three different human body movements from seven human subjects were considered to assess the influ- ence of human activity on the channel behavior. This was performed both in an anechoic chamber and an indoor scenario. The authors ‘‘Raffaele D’Errico and Laurent K. Sayrafian-Pour (&) National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA e-mail: ksayrafian@nist.gov K. Yekeh Yazdandoost (&) National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Yokosuka, Japan e-mail: yazdandoost@nict.go.jp 123 Int J Wireless Inf Networks (2010) 17:89–91 DOI 10.1007/s10776-010-0125-x