A Study on Various Routing Techniques and QoS Issues in WBAN

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an active research area in the field of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). WBAN consists of miniature, portable, autonomous and heterogeneous sensor nodes. It is mainly used in health monitoring system. WBAN is a three tier architecture, in which architecture of WBAN can be divided into inter-BAN, intra-BAN and beyond-BAN communication. Quality of Service (QoS) of WBAN is an area that is needed to be explored. QoS is one of the most important features for any applications. QoS in WBAN can be characterized by reliability, robustness, availability, data transmission, packet loss, error rates and security. It is used in medical as well as in non-medical fields. Routing protocols of WBAN play an important role because communication or transmitting & receiving of data depend on routing. Different routing schemes are proposed for to make efficient network. Single-hop and multi-hop routing are used to transmit the information to the sink node. Single-hop means transmission of information from nodes to the sink node directly and multi-hop routing means information is reached to the sink node through multiple nodes. Reliable delivery of data and QoS are the main issues of WBAN. In this paper, we provide an overview about routing techniques and QoS issues in WBAN.