Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology for medical and non-medical applications. WBANs consist of a number of miniaturized, portable, and autonomous sensor nodes that are used to monitor the body function and the surrounding environment. These sensor nodes continuously collect vital signs of patients, which are used for ubiquitous health monitoring including real-time diagnosis and prescription. In addition, WBANs may be used for managing catastrophic events and increasing the effectiveness and performance of rescue forces. Other potential applications include interactive gaming, social computing, entertainment, and military applications. The huge amount of data collected by WBAN nodes demands scalable, on-demand, powerful, and secure storage and processing infrastructure. Cloud computing is expected to play a significant role in achieving the aforementioned objectives. The cloud computing environment links different devices ranging from miniaturized sensor nodes to high-performance supercomputers for delivering people-centric and context-centric services to the individuals and industries. The possible integration of WBANs with cloud computing (WBAN-cloud) will introduce viable and hybrid platform that must be able to process the huge amount of data collected from multiple WBANs. This WBAN-cloud will enable users (including physicians and nurses) to globally access the processing and storage infrastructure at competitive costs. Because WBANs forward useful and life-critical information to the cloud – which may operate in distributed and hostile environments, novel security mechanisms are required to prevent malicious interactions to the storage infrastructure. Both the cloud providers and the users must take strong security measures to protect the storage infrastructure.

The aim of this special issue is to invite high quality unpublished research articles in the development of cloud computing environments for WBANs, articulate new perspectives, and highlight open issues and challenges. Particulary, this special issue will show the most recent advancements in WBAN-cloud computing domain. Original review and survey articles in this area will be appreciated. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Cloud computing algorithms for resource allocation
Fault tolerance and reliability
Scalability in processing and storage infrastructure
Models for supporting mobility in WBAN-cloud environment
Cloud monitoring and maintenance
Traffic and load balancing in the WBAN-cloud environment
Security and privacy

Submission Guidelines

All manuscripts should be submitted through Elsevier Editorial System (EES). The authors must select as “cloud-assisted wireless body area networks” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process. The EES website is located at: http://www.ees.elsevier.com/ins

Important Dates:
Paper submission: July. 1, 2013
Review notification: Nov. 1, 2013
Revision: Jan. 1, 2014
Final acceptance notification: Feb. 25, 2014
Publication: Mid-2014



Editor-in-Chief

Prof. Witold Pedrycz
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta
Electrical and Computer Engineering Research Facility, Edmonton, T6G 2V4, Canada
Email: pedrycz@ualberta.ca

Guest Editors

Prof. Athanasios Vasilakos
Department of Computer Science, Kuwait University, Kuwait
Email: vasilako@ath.forthnet.gr

Prof. Han-Chieh Chao
College of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
National Ilan University, I-Lan, Taiwan
Email: hcchao@gmail.com

Dr. Sana Ullah
College of Computer and Information Science, King Saud University, Riyadh
Email: sullah@ksu.edu.sa

Prof. Jun Suzuki
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Email: jxs@cs.umb.edu