mHealth: WBANs’ Issues and Challenges

Abstract

Recent advances in wireless networked systems, intelligent low-power sensors and medical sensors, have led to the development and emergence of new embedded networks in the last years known as Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). These WBANs carry the promise of expanding the quality of life and care across a large variety of healthcare applications. In this chapter, we will review two fundamental mechanisms of WBANs including data dissemination and sensor deployment. A bi-objective nonlinear non-convex model based on a Min-Max formulation is proposed for deployment issue. On the other hand, a trade-off between energy consumption and the number of hops in the network was proposed for the purpose of data dissemination. The common objective of these two main proposals is saving energy and hence increasing network lifetime.