On Cognitive Radio-based Wireless Body Area Networks for medical applications

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is envisioned to provide a wide range of health-care services to patients in medical environment such as hospitals and clinics. This increases the deployment of wireless platforms in medical environment that bring new challenges, such as interference with neighboring medical devices and the degradation of Quality of Service (QoS) performance, which may be critical to patient's safety. Cognitive Radio (CR) is next-generation wireless communications, and artificial intelligence has been widely adopted to provide self-learning in order to observe, learn and take action against its operating environment. The application of CR in medical wireless environment can cater to the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we present a review on the limited literature on CR-based WBAN, highlighting some pioneering schemes in this area. We present two architectures, two state-of-the-art applications of CR (i.e. Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) reduction and QoS enhancement), as well as a number of schemes in CR-based WBAN. While there are numerous research efforts investigating CR and WBAN respectively, the research into CR-based WBAN remains at the infancy stage. This paper discusses various open issues related to CR-based WBAN in order to spark new interests in this research area.