Cloudlet-enabled wireless body area networks (WBANs): a systematic review, architecture, and research directions for QoS improvement

Wireless body area networks (WBANs), mobile devices and cloud computing are the backbone technologies of pervasive healthcare systems. WBANs ecosystem possesses certain limitations such as wireless communication, security, data validation, data consistency and many more, that are needed to be addressed for an efficient WBAN system. Consequently, Cloud Computing is used to overcome WBAN’s limitations. The ubiquitous and scalable nature of the Cloud makes it the most suitable architecture to integrate with WBAN for delivering an efficient pervasive healthcare ecosystem. Although, researchers are focusing on integrating cloud and WBAN system, there is a void of systematic analysis in terms of technology's state-of- the-art, and research directions for improving Quality of Services (QoS). As an endeavour to fill this void, the authors propose this review on Cloud-assisted WBAN ecosystem based on the classical systematic review approach with few modifications. We investigate the role, need and use of Cloud in empowering WBAN. Also, we address various aspects of this integrated ecosystem such as definitions, technologies, Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, and existing solutions. Furthermore, this study helps the readers identify and select the research potentials in their respective areas. This paper presents the first study on Cloudlet-enabled WBAN system using a systematic review approach.