Abstract
In this survey a new application paradigm life and safety for critical operations and missions using wearable Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) technology is introduced. This paradigm has a vast scope of applications, including disaster management, worker safety in harsh environments such as roadside and building workers, mobile health monitoring, ambient assisted living and many more. It is often the case that during the critical operations and the target conditions, the existing infrastructure is either absent, damaged or overcrowded. In this context, it is envisioned that WBANs will enable the quick deployment of ad-hoc/on-the-fly communication networks to help save many lives and ensuring people's safety. However, to understand the applications more deeply and their specific characteristics and requirements, this survey presents a comprehensive study on the applications scenarios, their context and specific requirements. It explores details of the key enabling standards, existing state-of-the-art research studies, and projects to understand their limitations before realizing aforementioned applications. Application-specific challenges and issues are discussed comprehensively from various perspectives and future research and development directions are highlighted as an inspiration for new innovative solutions. To conclude, this survey opens up a good opportunity for companies and research centers to investigate old but still new problems, in the realm of wearable technologies, which are increasingly evolving and getting more and more attention recently.
Highlights
The increase in average lifespan and the pressure on health budgets in many developed countries have resulted to be important catalysts for the development of innovative and cost-effective health care solutions
On the one hand duty-cycling is necessary to reduce the energy consumption but it has to meet the dynamic traffic variations of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), which becomes difficult under TDMA mechanisms that is widely used in duty cycling, work such as [4] could be very effective in this context
The classification and state-of-the-art routing protocols for WBANs can be divided into several important sub categories, which include multipath routing, quality of services (QoS)-aware routing, cluster-based routing, mission-critical reliable routing, and others that are shown in Figure 17, and explained
Summary
The increase in average lifespan and the pressure on health budgets in many developed countries have resulted to be important catalysts for the development of innovative and cost-effective health care solutions. Still be transmitted from the deployed mobile workforces teams to external command centers to ensure timely and effective decision making In this context, the resulting Wearable WBAN systems for safety and life critical applications should be autonomous, self-organizing, large scale, robust to external interferences, energy efficient, secure, and support various data types and rates. The resulting Wearable WBAN systems for safety and life critical applications should be autonomous, self-organizing, large scale, robust to external interferences, energy efficient, secure, and support various data types and rates These systems should enable cooperative (or collaborative), reliable and real-time communications while providing various quality of services (QoS) and security levels. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: after this Introduction, WBANs for life and safety critical applications are presented, which includes key technologies, detailed specific applications and requirements, and the limitations of the existing solutions with regards to the given applications are discussed.
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