Guest Editorial Special Issue on Communications Technologies and Infrastructures for Smart e-Health Systems

The papers in included in this special issue examines new and novel communication methods for smart e-health systems. Recent developments in the healthcare domain have facilitated the integration of several technologies for smart, cost-effective, reliable, and pervasive health monitoring of chronic diseases. Current research efforts focus on developing real-time communication methods, mostly for body area networks (BANs) that are used to deliver patients´ information effectively. These efforts are limited to communication within a BAN; however, less attention has been paid to connect multiple BANs to remote servers in real time. In addition, there is a limited study on the integration of BANs with different technologies including mobile cloud computing—a technology that may assist in storing and processing the huge amount of BAN data at competitive costs. Machine to machine is also considered to be a valuable paradigm in delivering BAN data to a remote server/cloud for further analysis. This may assist in reducing risks and cost of remote health monitoring. Unlike conventional research in BANs where researchers focused on individual networks, there is a need to develop innovative communication methods with a focus on complete and smart e-health systems. This smart e-health system must integrate the aforementioned technologies with multiple BANs, and provide rich healthcare services to end users. It calls for research on versatile topics ranging from physical and medium access control protocols to BANs coexistence, traffic characterization, cloud resource allocation, and cloud monitoring and maintenance.