Surveying the Wireless Body Area Network in the realm of wireless communication

Abstract

Advances in wireless communication technologies and sensors have empowered development of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). The wireless nature of network and variety of sensors offer numerous new, practical and innovative applications to improve health monitoring and other health care applications system. In the past few years, many researches focused on building system architecture of health monitoring to improve the technical requirement specifically designed for WBAN. However, as part of communication medium, WBAN faces with various security issues such as loss of data, authentication and access control. Less research were found in providing strong security system in WBAN. Throughout this study, we believe that WBAN can provide various applications including medical and non-medical. In this paper, we present an overview of body area network and their related issues emphasis in security problem. We also provide the differences between Wireless Body Area Network and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that is inadequate to apply in WBAN although some challenges faced by WBAN are in many ways similar to WSN. Finally, we highlight security challenges that still need to be addressed to make WBAN truly ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.