A comprehensive systematic literature review on security and authentication techniques for wireless body area network (WBAN)

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) have emerged as a transformative technology in healthcare and wellness monitoring, enabling real-time data collection, remote patient observation, and early disease detection. Numerous studies have explored WBAN architectures, security protocols, and authentication mechanisms, yet their findings remain fragmented across different applications and standards. This work presents a comprehensive systematic literature review focusing on security and authentication techniques in WBAN, evaluating their strengths, limitations, and technology readiness levels. Despite significant progress, a lack of unified, lightweight, and energy-efficient security solutions remains, which fail to address interoperability, device constraints, and evolving cyber threats in real-world healthcare deployments. Our review consolidates findings from 129 research papers (2013–2025) to develop a taxonomy of WBAN security and authentication techniques, highlighting key research trends. We adopted a systematic approach, screening articles from IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, ACM Digital Library, and other repositories using defined inclusion/exclusion criteria and Technology Readiness Level (TRL) based evaluation. The study categorises contributions based on areas of specialisation (e.g., clinical care, fitness, IoT integration) and employs thematic analysis to classify techniques as per their TRL levels. The review identifies critical issues like Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability (CIA), and a taxonomy of security authentication techniques with their comparative analysis.