Resource Allocation in Wireless Body Area Networks: A Smart City Perspective

Healthcare is an essential service in smart cities. To deploy healthcare systems in such cities, personal health monitoring systems, infrastructure for collecting and delivering individual data, and a system for diagnosing symptoms are required. For the first requirement, wireless body area networks (WBANs) have recently received considerable attention from research communities. Owing to their main distinguishable features from general wireless sensor networks, research challenges regarding WBANs have been focused on network topology around the body and implanted nodes, efficient resource allocation, and power control. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive discussion on the emerging research trends in the area of wireless sensor networks and a discussion of WBANs in terms of their resource allocation.