# Opportunities and Challenges for Error Correction Scheme for Wireless Body Area Network--A Survey
## 1 Introduction  
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) is termed as a wireless network in and around the human body. This network combines the study of medical and communication technologies. WBAN has received increased attentions and it has been widely researched due to its possible use on medical and non-medical applications. WBAN is an essential process for many applications, such as medical sensing and control, health and wellness nursing, personal audio or video, wearable computing, location finding, and identification. As WBAN is around a human body, the communication distance between devices in WBAN cover only a short range, typically a few meters [1; 2; 3; 4; 5]. WBANs come with opportunities as well as challenges. It is anticipated that wearable and implant sensors used in WBAN will facilitate advanced way for human wellbeing monitoring [6]. These opportunities come with various challenges. Firstly, power consumptions on implant and wearable sensors should be ultra-low to boost network's life, as these devices are battery operated and battery replacement is a complex medical procedure for certain conditions [1; 4]. Secondly, the network is required to handle various types of data, including medical and non-medical. The expected Quality of Service (QoS) and delay requirement for those data are different. In addition, the network should provide ways to handle different types of data and delay requirements for those data. Finally, the interference that is caused by the existence of other networks should be considered during WBAN implementation [7]. The design and implementation of Error Correction Schemes (ECSs) in WBAN have numerous challenges. First, some nodes in WBAN are energetically and computationally constrained as the operation of node is performed by battery and battery replacement is a complex process. Second, the ECS used in the WBAN should be able to support different levels of reliability according to data (medical and non-medical data) and variable data rates. The proper design and implementation of ECS on WBAN may lead to energy saving on the WBAN nodes as well as improving the reliability of the communication link in WBAN. The energy saving on WBAN nodes, such as implant and wearable nodes, are very important. The energy saving at energy-constrained node may lead to better quality of life as it helps to reduce the number of complex medical procedure. In addition, health and wellness monitoring of human can be enhanced significantly, as we would be able to improve the reliability of WBAN communication using ECS. Therefore, the proper understanding of ECS on WBAN will help to improve the reliability of communication links on WBAN and support different reliability for different sets of data. The motivation of this paper is to present the current scenarios of ECS on WBAN and future opportunities and challenges regarding ECS design and the implementation of WBAN. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of ECS and WBAN, including IEEE standard, channel and network models, followed by a detailed literature review on the proposed ECS for WBAN. The review is conducted based on different aspects. The first aspect of the review is to examine the parameters that are considered during the research work by the researcher. The key parameters for the study or experiment are the type of WBANs, environment of the network, IEEE standard, and physical media. Firstly, the study can consider the network with one hop or two-hop extended star network. Secondly, the study can be conducted using standalone WBAN only or WBAN with a certain environment. Thirdly, the study may depend on the IEEE standard and the physical media i.e., frequency band. The second aspect of the review is whether the research work considers different types of reliability and delay requirement for different data types (medical and non-medical data) or not. Another key review area is how the reliability of WBAN is measured and what type of data (random or real data) is used during the research work.