Performance issues in wireless body area networks for the healthcare application: a survey and future prospects

This study presents a survey of the current issues, application areas, findings, and performance challenges in wireless body area networks (WBAN). The survey discusses selected areas in WBAN signal processing, network reliability, spectrum management, security, and WBAN integration with other technologies for highly efficient future healthcare applications. The foundation of the study bases on the recent growing advances in microelectronic technology and commercialization, which ease device availability, miniaturization, and communication. The survey considers a systemic review conducted using reports, standard documents, and peer-reviewed articles. Based on the comprehensive review, we find WBANs faces several operational, standardization, and security issues, affecting performance and maintenance of user safety and privacy. We envision the increasing dependency of future healthcare on WBAN for medical and non-medical applications due to internet connectivity advances. In this view, despite the WBAN advantages in remote health monitoring, further studies need to be conducted for performance optimization. Therefore we finalize our study by proposing various current and future research directions and open issues in WBAN’s performance enhancement.