Abstract
A wireless body area network (WBAN) is a network of low-power devices including smart sensors situated in, on, or around the human body to monitor the physiological and motion information for healthcare, military, sports, security, firefighting, as well as other applications and purposes. Reliability is one of the major changes to address for delivering the desired quality of services of WBANs. In this chapter, a critical review of WBAN reliability-related literature is conducted, covering reliability modeling, analysis, and designs. A reliability model is also presented for WBANs subject to the probabilistic function dependence and associated probabilistic isolation and competing behaviors. The model is demonstrated through a case study on the reliability analysis of a WBAN patient monitoring system.