Abstract—In the modern living era, changing peoples’ life style and aging have subjected human kind into many health risks. It is therefore necessary to monitor individual health status for timely preventive and emergency health care services. Advances in micro fabricated electromechanical devices (MEMs) and related technologies, envisaged development of miniaturized wireless devices for remote health monitoring and diagnosis. Today, proper functioning of the vital organs of the human body such as; kidneys, lungs, heart and brain activity can be monitored through measuring related parameters using biological sensors. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) technology use IEEE 802.15.6 standard for Health monitoring based on RF or non-RF communication schemes. Using this standard, miniaturized MEMs can measure, aggregate and communicate vital body organs’ health information. Ensuring healthy organs guarantees for extended biological life time, however monitored information may be hindered by many factors over a wireless link. In fact, efficient data communication depends on the network infrastructure model and link management. Extreme network or device failures constraints data packet communication due to irregularities in frame structure and link reliability. In broad aspect, WBAN are mainly challenged by link reliability and overall quality of service. The major contribution of this paper is provision of overall survey on current development, network reliability and QoS challenges as well as some open issues in WBAN. 

Index Terms—electromechanical devices (MEM), remote health monitoring, wireless body area networks (WBAN), reliability, quality of service (QoS)

Cite: Kefa G. Mkongwa, Qingling Liu, Chaozhu Zhang, and Faizan A. Siddiqui, "Reliability and Quality of Service Issues in Wireless Body Area Networks: A Survey," International Journal of Signal Processing Systems, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 26-31, March 2019. doi: 10.18178/ijsps.7.1.26-31