Abstract:
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is an emerging platform for most of the humancentered
applications, ranging from sports to medical performance monitoring. The ubiquitous
and scalable nature of cloud makes it the most suited architecture for integrating it with WBAN
to overcome its limitations. There are various research challenges in cloud-enabled WBAN for
Quality of Service (QoS) improvement such as (i) architectural design for Cloud-enabled
WBANs, (ii) Reliable and energy-efficient routing protocols for WBANs, (iii) Cloud resource
allocation mechanisms, (iv) Semantics interactions, and (v) Data security. Among all the
aforementioned research challenges, the architectural design and cloud resource allocation have
been addressed in this research work. Therefore, to fill the void, we have designed developed
Cloud-WBAN, a simulation toolkit, that not only brings the cloud computing system closer to
the WBANs user (edge-of-things computing) but also automatically adjust the computing
resources (at cloudlet) so as to maintain the service level agreements (SLAs) of the WBANs
users on the basis of it's sensory data volume and application's type.
The thesis is organized in six chapters as discussed below:
Chapter 1: The introductory chapter briefs the details about the autonomic resource
provisioning frameworks for WBAN services in cloud computing. It then highlights the
research problems and objectives that leads to the proposed framework and resource allocation
mechanisms. Subsequently, it explains the methodology used in the research and the
contributions. In conclusion, it covers the thesis organization.
Chapter 2: This chapter discusses the definition, constraints, and challenges of WBANs. It
also highlights the type and characteristics of WBANs applications. It then details the
definition, deployment and service models, and elasticity concepts of cloud computing. It
investigate the role, need and use of cloud in empowering WBANs. Finally, it presents
architectural design, research directions for quality of service (QoS) improvements for cloudenabled
WBANs ecosystem.
Chapter 3: It has been observed that there is a lack of an experimental toolkit for addressing
the Cloud-enabled WBANs environments. This chapter presents the design and development of
Cloud-WBAN, a simulation toolkit that brings the cloud computing system closer to the
I
WBANs user and automatically adjust the computing resources (at cloudlet) so as to maintain
the SLA of the WBANs users on the basis of it's sensory data volume and application's type.
The WBANs module also acts as the client entity, which is by in large missing in most of the
cloud computing research till date. Some of the parameters configured in Cloud-WBAN are :
experimentation time, number of WBAN users, WBAN modalities, data transmission rate, data
sampling rate, mobility model of WBAN users, communication mediums/channels, number of
virtual machines. This chapter also presents a hybrid resource provisioning framework which is
the combination of autonomic computing and queuing model. The effectiveness of the resource
provisioning framework is evaluated and the experimental results shows that it improves the
resource utilization by at least 26% and response time by at least 49% as compared with other
approaches.
Chapter 4: This chapter argues the research gap in terms of optimal resource provisioning that
predicts and automatically adjust the computing resources on the basis of sensory data volume
and application's type. This chapter presents a hybrid autonomic resource provisioning
framework, which is the combination of autonomic computing, fuzzy logic control and linear
regression model. The effectiveness of this approach is evaluated under a real workload trace.
The experimental results shows that it minimizes the cost by at least 27% and SLA violations
by at least 78% as compared with other approaches.
Chapter 5: This chapter presents a novel autonomic resource provisioning framework for
parallel scientific application. We have developed an elasticity controller which is the
combination of fuzzy logic control and autonomic computing. This controller computes the
required amount of CPU core(s) considering the information about application's internal
workload and resource utilization of the virtual machine. This is the first study that uses
CloudSim toolkit to address : (i) execution of parallel application, and (ii) fine-grained resource
provisioning. The experimental results show that this approach minimizes the finish time by up
to 64% and increases the resource utilization by up to 36% compared with other approaches.
Chapter 6: This chapter concludes the thesis with the discussion on the results and
contributions. The future scopes of work also have been presented in this chapter.