This study presents a survey of the current issues, application areas, findings, and performance challenges in wireless body area networks (WBAN). The survey discusses selected areas in WBAN signal processing, network reliability, spectrum management, security, and WBAN integration with other technologies for highly efficient future healthcare applications. The foundation of the study bases on the recent growing advances in microelectronic technology and commercialization, which ease device availability, miniaturization, and communication. The survey considers a systemic review conducted using reports, standard documents, and peer-reviewed articles. Based on the comprehensive review, we find WBANs faces several operational, standardization, and security issues, affecting performance and maintenance of user safety and privacy. We envision the increasing dependency of future healthcare on WBAN for medical and non-medical applications due to internet connectivity advances. In this view, despite the WBAN advantages in remote health monitoring, further studies need to be conducted for performance optimization. Therefore we finalize our study by proposing various current and future research directions and open issues in WBAN’s performance enhancement.

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) require long life links and energy efficient system. Besides the increasing commercialization of WBAN, health monitoring applications calls for enhanced quality of service (QoS). The establishment of the reliable and energy efficient link is crucial to support the improvement of the WBAN performance parameters. In this article, we propose a cross-layer routing mechanism for WBAN quality of service enhancement. The protocol uses a cost function, which linearly combines node energy ratio, link reliability, and specific absorption rate functions. The proposed algorithm initially maximizes network lifetime longevity by reducing node energy consumption with nearly reasonable throughput and the packet delivery ratio whereas the enhancement of the QoS focused on improving network throughput and the packet delivery success rate for WBAN applications. The algorithm is implemented in two stages, firstly by designing the energy efficient and reliable link routing policy in the network layer and secondly the adjustment of the contention window for QoS performance enhancement in the data link layer using IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol. We conduct parametric modeling of the cost function to analyze network performance in different parametric combinations and contention window adjustments. Simulation results show the proposed protocol improves network performance indicators such as energy efficiency, lifetime longevity maximization, throughput, packet success delivery ratio, reduced end to end delay, and routing overhead.