Communication challenges in high-density deployments of wearable wireless devices

Wearable wireless devices are very likely to soon move into the mainstream of our society, led by the rapidly expanding multibillion dollar health and fitness markets. Should wearable technology sales follow the same pattern as those of smartphones and tablets, these new devices (a.k.a. wearables) will see explosive growth and high adoption rates over the next five years. It also means that wearables will need to become more sophisticated, capturing what the user sees, hears, or even feels. However, with an avalanche of new wearables, we will need to find ways to supply them with low-latency highspeed data connections to enable truly demanding use cases such as augmented reality. This is particularly true for high-density wearable computing scenarios, such as public transportation, where existing wireless technology may have difficulty supporting stringent application requirements. In this article, we summarize our recent progress in this area with a comprehensive review of current and emerging connectivity solutions for high-density wearable deployments, their relative performance, and open communication challenges.