Comparative Study of Techniques for Congestion Avoidance & Control in Wireless Body Area Networks

In past few years, considerable amount of research has been done in wireless sensor networks which have helped to discover the potential of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in many areas such as military, environment, communication, healthcare etc. Major improvements have been noted in healthcare having prominent discoveries in wireless body area networks (WBAN). WBANs help in monitoring the health of the patients remotely and prove to be a very economical solution for healthcare providers as well as patients by gathering biological data and transmitting it to the base station or the healthcare providers. Along with benefits, come various limitations of WBANs like coverage area, data security, congestion, scalability etc. Congestion has become one of the major issues in healthcare and if not addressed in time, can lead to critical packets not being sent and delay in receiving critical information which can prove harmful for the patient. In this paper, an extensive study has been done to study about various protocols developed to detect, avoid and mitigate congestion in order to provide seamless and timely delivery of services.