A Lightweight Security Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks: Design, Energy Evaluation and Proposed Microprocessor Design

In order for wireless body area networks to meet widespread adoption, a number of security implications must be explored to promote and maintain fundamental medical ethical principles and social expectations. As a result, integration of security functionality to sensor nodes is required. Integrating security functionality to a wireless sensor node increases the size of the stored software program in program memory, the required time that the sensor's microprocessor needs to process the data and the wireless network traffic which is exchanged among sensors. This security overhead has dominant impact on the energy dissipation which is strongly related to the lifetime of the sensor, a critical aspect in wireless sensor network (WSN) technology. Strict definition of the security functionality, complete hardware model (microprocessor and radio), WBAN topology and the structure of the medium access control (MAC) frame are required for an accurate estimation of the energy that security introduces into the WBAN. In this work, we define a lightweight security scheme for WBAN, we estimate the additional energy consumption that the security scheme introduces to WBAN based on commercial available off-the-shelf hardware components (microprocessor and radio), the network topology and the MAC frame. Furthermore, we propose a new microcontroller design in order to reduce the energy consumption of the system. Experimental results and comparisons with other works are given.     

一种基于双功能节点的节能多跳路由协议

针对无线传感网融合节点位置欠佳和传感器节点的能量消耗不均会严重影响网络生存周期的问题,提出了一种基于双功能节点的节能多跳路由协议。该协议综合考虑节点的能量、位置以及所在层次区域等多种因素,通过引入通信节点来重组网格和中继网格间路由,减轻了网格融合节点的开销,均衡了网络的能量分布。仿真结果表明,该路由协议的网络生命周期比Multi hop EEBCDA等协议至少延长17.5%,且节点的能量消耗更加均衡。     

Wireless Body Sensor Network Using Medical Implant Band

A wireless body sensor network hardware has been designed and implemented based on MICS (Medical Implant Communication Service) band. The MICS band offers the advantage of miniaturized electronic devices that can either be used as an implanted node or as an external node. In this work, the prototype system uses temperature and pulse rate sensors on nodes. The sensor node can transmit data over the air to a remote central control unit (CCU) for further processing, monitoring and storage. The developed system offers medical staff to obtain patient’s physiological data on demand basis via the Internet. Some preliminary performance data is presented in the paper.     

Cooperative wireless network control based health and activity monitoring system

A real-time cooperative communication based wireless network is presented for monitoring health and activity of an end-user in their environment. The cooperative communication offers better energy consumption and also an opportunity to aware the current location of a user non-intrusively. The link between mobile sensor node and relay node is dynamically established by using Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator (LQI) based on adaptive relay selection scheme. The study proposes a Linear Acceleration based Transmission Power Decision Control (LA-TPDC) algorithm to further enhance the energy efficiency of cooperative communication. Further, the occurrences of false alarms are carefully prevented by introducing three stages of sequential warning system. The real-time experiments are carried-out by using the nodes, namely mobile sensor node, relay nodes and a destination node which are indigenously developed by using a CC430 microcontroller integrated with an in-built transceiver at 868 MHz. The wireless node performance characteristics, such as energy consumption, Signal-Noise ratio (SNR), Bit Error Rate (BER), Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and transmission offset are evaluated for all the participated nodes. The experimental results observed that the proposed linear acceleration based transmission power decision control algorithm almost doubles the battery life time than energy efficient conventional cooperative communication.     

A Comprehensive Survey of Wireless Body Area Networks

Recent advances in microelectronics and integrated circuits, system-on-chip design, wireless communication and intelligent low-power sensors have allowed the realization of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN is a collection of low-power, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive lightweight wireless sensor nodes that monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. In addition, it supports a number of innovative and interesting applications such as ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, interactive gaming, and military applications. In this paper, the fundamental mechanisms of WBAN including architecture and topology, wireless implant communication, low-power Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols are reviewed. A comprehensive study of the proposed technologies for WBAN at Physical (PHY), MAC, and Network layers is presented and many useful solutions are discussed for each layer. Finally, numerous WBAN applications are highlighted.     

基于BA无标度网络的WSNs拓扑优化模型

由于无线传感器能量受限,最大化网络生命周期成为优化网络拓扑首要考虑的问题。基于BA无标度理论,提出了一种WSNs拓扑优化模型（WTOM）。在网络中引入超级节点,结合粒子群算法合理地划分整个网络;在节点间建立多因素为导向的虚拟力场,利用虚拟力调整超级节点的部署位置,实现网络能量的均衡消耗,通过对关键节点的保护,提高网络的抗毁鲁棒性。经理论分析和实验证明,该网络不仅继承了BA无标度网络的特征还具有小世界特性;同时该动态拓扑延长了网络的生命周期,提高了网络面向数据收集的节能性。     

基于能量均衡的WSN多跳非均匀分簇路由算法

在无线传感器网络路由协议中采用多跳通信的方式能够减少通讯距离、增强网络通讯的稳定性并提高网络能量利用效率,但是,由于靠近汇聚节点的簇头需要转发大量数据,容易导致能量快速衰竭而失效,造成“能量空洞”现象。提出了一种新型的基于能量均衡的多跳非均匀分簇路由算法（MUCRA）,采用逐层成簇的策略,簇头以一定的半径广播分层信号,划分下一层网络区域非均匀层次,普通的传感器节点和簇头根据分层信息选择合适的网络路径。仿真实验结果表明：与经典的LEACH协议及EEUC协议相比,该算法能有效平衡网络负载,缓解“能量空洞”问题     

工业无线传感网可靠路由及部署方案

在传感网中如果2棵以Sink节点为根节点的生成树使得网络中任意源节点在这2棵树上到Sink节点的路径没有相交节点,称这2棵树为该网络的ND(Node Disjoint)树。针对工业无线传感网的应用需求与特点,研究了基于ND树的路由方案。仿真实验和分析表明,该路由方案具有较高的路由可靠性。针对该路由方案的特点与需要,给出了1种节点二连通(Twonodeconnected)网络的部署方案。     

An Improved Two-Layer Authentication Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) comprises a number of sensor nodes and the portable mobile device such as smartphone. It is used to monitor the physical condition and provide a reliable healthcare system. Utilizing the wireless communication network, sensor nodes collect the physiological data of one patient to the portable mobile device and the latter analyzes and transmits them to the application providers. Therefore, the personal data confidentiality and user privacy are cores of WBANs. Recently, Shen et al. presented a multi-layer authentication protocol for WBANs, which is lightweight and much easier to implement. However, we observe that their authentication between sensor nodes and the portable mobile device could ensure the forward security property only when the sensor nodes are changed (add or delete). When the sensor nodes are constant, the security property is not satisfied. Meanwhile, the authentication between the portable mobile device and application provider is prone to mutual impersonation attack, so the critical goal of mutual authentication can not be achieved. In this paper, an improved two-layer authentication scheme is proposed to remove the flaws. The analysis shows that our method is more secure and could withstand various attacks.     

Heart Motion Uncertainty Compensation Prediction Method for Robot Assisted Beating Heart Surgery – Master–slave Kalman Filters Approach

Information and communication technologies have thrived over the last few years. Healthcare systems have also benefited from this progression. A wireless body area network (WBAN) consists of small, low-power sensors used to monitor human physiological values remotely, which enables physicians to remotely monitor the health of patients. Communication security in WBANs is essential because it involves human physiological data. Key agreement and authentication are the primary issues in the security of WBANs. To agree upon a common key, the nodes exchange information with each other using wireless communication. This information exchange process must be secure enough or the information exchange should be minimized to a certain level so that if information leak occurs, it does not affect the overall system. Most of the existing solutions for this problem exchange too much information for the sake of key agreement; getting this information is sufficient for an attacker to reproduce the key. Set reconciliation is a technique used to reconcile two similar sets held by two different hosts with minimal communication complexity. This paper presents a broadcast-based key agreement scheme using set reconciliation for secure communication in WBANs. The proposed scheme allows the neighboring nodes to agree upon a common key with the personal server (PS), generated from the electrocardiogram (EKG) feature set of the host body. Minimal information is exchanged in a broadcast manner, and even if every node is missing a different subset, by reconciling these feature sets, the whole network will still agree upon a single common key. Because of the limited information exchange, if an attacker gets the information in any way, he/she will not be able to reproduce the key. The proposed scheme mitigates replay, selective forwarding, and denial of service attacks using a challenge-response authentication mechanism. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has a great deal of adoptability in terms of security, communication overhead, and running time complexity, as compared to the existing EKG-based key agreement scheme.     

无线传感器网络在医疗领域的应用

讨论了无线传感器网络的节点组成、网络体系和协议栈模型，给出了一个远程医疗监护网络体系结构，并对无线传感器网络在医疗应用的主要方面、前景和面临的挑战进行了阐述。     

Ubiquitous Healthcare Computing with Sensor Grid Enhancement with Data Management System (SEGEDMA)

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can be deployed to monitor the health of patients suffering from critical diseases. Also a wireless network consisting of biomedical sensors can be implanted into the patient’s body and can monitor the patients’ conditions. These sensor devices, apart from having an enormous capability of collecting data from their physical surroundings, are also resource constraint in nature with a limited processing and communication ability. Therefore we have to integrate them with the Grid technology in order to process and store the collected data by the sensor nodes. In this paper, we proposed the SEnsor Grid Enhancement Data Management system, called SEGEDMA ensuring the integration of different network technologies and the continuous data access to system users. The main contribution of this work is to achieve the interoperability of both technologies through a novel network architecture ensuring also the interoperability of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and HL7 standards. According to the results, SEGEDMA can be applied successfully in a decentralized healthcare environment.     

Seamless Interworking Architecture for WBAN in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with QoS Guarantees

The IEEE 802.15.6 standard is a communication standard optimized for low-power and short-range in-body/on-body nodes to serve a variety of medical, consumer electronics and entertainment applications. Providing high mobility with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) to a WBAN user in heterogeneous wireless networks is a challenging task. A WBAN uses a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to gather data from body sensors and forwards it to a remote server through wide range wireless networks. In this paper, we present a coexistence study of WBAN with Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWANs). The main issue is interworking of WBAN in heterogenous wireless networks including seamless handover, QoS, emergency services, cooperation and security. We propose a Seamless Interworking Architecture (SIA) for WBAN in heterogenous wireless networks based on a cost function. The cost function is based on power consumption and data throughput costs. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms typical approaches in terms of throughput, delay and packet loss rate.     

An Authentication Scheme to Healthcare Security under Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, Taiwan has been seeing an extension of the average life expectancy and a drop in overall fertility rate, initiating our country into an aged society. Due to this phenomenon, how to provide the elderly and patients with chronic diseases a suitable healthcare environment has become a critical issue presently. Therefore, we propose a new scheme that integrates healthcare services with wireless sensor technology in which sensor nodes are employed to measure patients' vital signs. Data collected from these sensor nodes are then transmitted to mobile devices of the medical staff and system administrator, promptly enabling them to understand the patients' condition in real time, which will significantly improve patients' healthcare quality. As per the personal data protection act, patients' vital signs can only be accessed by authorized medical staff. In order to protect patients', the system administrator will verify the medical staff's identity through the mobile device using a smart card and password mechanism. Accordingly, only the verified medical staff can obtain patients' vital signs data such as their blood pressure, pulsation, and body temperature, etc.. Besides, the scheme includes a time-bounded characteristic that allows the verified staff access to data without having to have to re-authenticate and re-login into the system within a set period of time. Consequently, the time-bounded property also increases the work efficiency of the system administrator and user.     

无线医疗传感器网络隐私保护技术研究

医疗卫生领域是无线传感器网络的一个热点应用领域,针对无线医疗传感器网络中存在的隐私保护问题,根据不同的数据操作需求,对其隐私保护研究现状进行了综述,说明了关键实现技术,同时提出了未来可能的发展趋势和研究方向。     

Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Network-Fujisaki Okamoto(FO) Authentication Scheme against Sybil Attack

In the wireless sensor network(WSN) security is a major issue. There are several network security schemes proposed in research. In the network, malicious nodes obstruct the performance of the network. The network can be vulnerable by Sybil attack. When a node illicitly assertions multiple identities or claims fake IDs, the WSN grieves from an attack named Sybil attack. This attack threatens wireless sensor network in data aggregation, synchronizing system, routing, fair resource allocation and misbehavior detection. Henceforth, the research is carried out to prevent the Sybil attack and increase the performance of the network. This paper presents the novel security mechanism and Fujisaki Okamoto algorithm and also application of the work. The Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) algorithm is ID based cryptographic scheme and gives strong authentication against Sybil attack. By using Network simulator2 (NS2) the scheme is simulated. In this proposed scheme broadcasting key, time taken for different key sizes, energy consumption, Packet delivery ratio, Throughput were analyzed.     

Towards Interactive Medical Content Delivery Between Simulated Body Sensor Networks and Practical Data Center

With the development of IoT (Internet of Thing), big data analysis and cloud computing, traditional medical information system integrates with these new technologies. The establishment of cloud-based smart healthcare application gets more and more attention. In this paper, semi-physical simulation technology is applied to cloud-based smart healthcare system. The Body sensor network (BSN) of system transmit has two ways of data collection and transmission. The one is using practical BSN to collect data and transmitting it to the data center. The other is transmitting real medical data to practical data center by simulating BSN. In order to transmit real medical data to practical data center by simulating BSN under semi-physical simulation environment, this paper designs an OPNET packet structure, defines a gateway node model between simulating BSN and practical data center and builds a custom protocol stack. Moreover, this paper conducts a large amount of simulation on the real data transmission through simulation network connecting with practical network. The simulation result can provides a reference for parameter settings of fully practical network and reduces the cost of devices and personnel involved.     

Monitoring of Physiological Parameters from Multiple Patients Using Wireless Sensor Network

This paper presents a wireless sensor network system that has the capability to monitor physiological parameters from multiple patient bodies. The system uses the Medical Implant Communication Service band between the sensor nodes and a remote central control unit (CCU) that behaves as a base station. The CCU communicates with another network standard (the internet or a mobile network) for a long distance data transfer. The proposed system offers mobility to patients and flexibility to medical staff to obtain patient’s physiological data on demand basis via Internet. A prototype sensor network including hardware, firmware and software designs has been implemented and tested. The developed system has been optimized for power consumption by having the nodes sleep when there is no communication via a bidirectional communication.     

An Ultra Low-power and Traffic-adaptive Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) consists of low-power, miniaturized, and autonomous wireless sensor nodes that enable physicians to remotely monitor vital signs of patients and provide real-time feedback with medical diagnosis and consultations. It is the most reliable and cheaper way to take care of patients suffering from chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Some of the most important attributes of WBAN is low-power consumption and delay. This can be achieved by introducing flexible duty cycling techniques on the energy constraint sensor nodes. Stated otherwise, low duty cycle nodes should not receive frequent synchronization and control packets if they have no data to send/receive. In this paper, we introduce a Traffic-adaptive MAC protocol (TaMAC) by taking into account the traffic information of the sensor nodes. The protocol dynamically adjusts the duty cycle of the sensor nodes according to their traffic-patterns, thus solving the idle listening and overhearing problems. The traffic-patterns of all sensor nodes are organized and maintained by the coordinator. The TaMAC protocol is supported by a wakeup radio that is used to accommodate emergency and on-demand events in a reliable manner. The wakeup radio uses a separate control channel along with the data channel and therefore it has considerably low power consumption requirements. Analytical expressions are derived to analyze and compare the performance of the TaMAC protocol with the well-known beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, WiseMAC, and SMAC protocols. The analytical derivations are further validated by simulation results. It is shown that the TaMAC protocol outperforms all other protocols in terms of power consumption and delay.