Wireless Energy and Information Transfer in WBAN: An Overview

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) aim to improve the speed, accuracy and reliability of communication of sensors/actuators that are energy-limited. Some significant physiological parameters need a higher transmission rate and a larger amount of energy. Since they harvest different amounts of energy from the surrounding environment of the human body, the advances in wireless energy transfer provide an attractive solution to supply continuous and stable energy for sensors. However, the additional energy dimension raises many new research problems and implementation issues in the dynamic and heterogeneous WBAN. It is important to perform a trade-off between wireless information and energy transmission. In this article, we provide an overview of the combination of wireless energy and information transmission in WBANs, and build three application models to highlight the key design challenges, solutions, and opportunities.