A Survey on Energy Harvesting and Integrated Data Sharing in Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are important branches of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). They promise unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring for real-time updates of patients' medical records that have aroused extensive attention in various fields. In recent years, one can find a lot of researches related to WBANs that have appeared in these literatures. But there are still many key issues that need to be further investigated. This paper briefly introduces the architecture and features of WBANs. In this attempt, we focus mostly on energy acquisition, data integration and data sharing, and collaboration of WBANs, from the viewpoint of energy harvesting development, the social network and smartphone application in WBANs, and the integration of WBANs and cloud system networks computing to analyze related issues of WBANs. Finally, we put forward concluding remarks with several future research directions.