Reliable MAC design for ambient assisted living: moving the coordination to the cloud

Abstract

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies constitute a new paradigm that promises quality of life enhancements in chronic-care patients and elderly people. From a communication perspective, they involve heterogeneous deployments of body and ambient sensors in compex, multihop topologies. Such networks can significantly benefit from the application of cooperative schemes based on network coding, where random linear combinations of the original data packets are transmitted in order to exploit diversity. Nevertheless, network coordination is sometimes required to obtain the full potential of these schemes, especially in the presence of channel errors, requiring the design of efficient, reliable and versatile Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. Motivated by the recent advances in cloud computing, we investigate the possibility of transferring the network coordination to the cloud while maintaining the data exchange and storage at a local data plane. Hence, we design a general framework for the development of cloud-assisted protocols for AAL applications and propose a high-performance and error-resilient MAC scheme with cloud capabilities.