QoS-based routing in Wireless Body Area Networks: a survey and taxonomy

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) constitutes a set of sensor nodes responsible for monitoring human physiological activities and actions. The increasing demand for real time applications in such networks stimulates many research activities in quality-of-service (QoS) based routing for data delivery. Designing such scheme of critical events while preserving the energy efficiency is a challenging task due to the dynamic of the network topology, severe constraints on power supply and limited in computation power and communication bandwidth. The design of QoS-based routing protocols becomes an essential part of WBANs and plays an important role in the communication stacks and has significant impact on the network performance. In this paper, we classify, survey, model and compare the most relevant and recent QoS-based routing protocols proposed in the framework of WBAN. A novel taxonomy of solutions is proposed, in which the comparison is performed with respect to relevant criteria. An analytical model is proposed in order to compare the performances of all the solutions. Furthermore, we provide a study of adaptability of the surveyed protocols related to the healthcare sector.