Future body-to-body networks for ubiquitous healthcare: a survey, taxonomy and challenges

Smart mobile people have a great potential to extend the existing Internet of Things infrastructures by implementing genuine ubiquitous healthcare (U-health) applications, ensuring anywhere and anytime patients connectivity. Through the forwarding of sensing data from person to person until reaching a connected medical server, concrete U-health becomes true with the emerging of future Body-to-Body Networks. Indeed, the coexistence of multiple WBANs (Wireless Body Area Networks), the communication and interactions between them extend the classical concept of WBAN and present the new paradigm referred to as Body-to-Body Network (BBN). This paradigm supports a number of innovative applications such as U-health, entertainment, interactive gaming and military, to cite a few. In this paper, we present a survey of BBNs focusing on three principal axes: energy efficiency, mobility prediction, and quality of service (QoS). Then, we present and discuss different candidate protocols that can be used in BBNs, while illustrating main BBN design challenges and several open issues.