A Provably-Secure Transmission Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area network (WBANs) is composed of sensors that collect and transmit a person’s physiological data to health-care providers in real-time. In order to guarantee security of this data over open networks, a secure data transmission mechanism between WBAN and application provider’s servers is of necessity. Modified medical data does not provide a true reflection of an individuals state of health and its subsequent use for diagnosis could lead to an irreversible medical condition. In this paper, we propose a lightweight certificateless signcryption scheme for secure transmission of data between WBAN and servers. Our proposed scheme not only provides confidentiality of data and authentication in a single logical step, it is lightweight and resistant to key escrow attacks. We further provide security proof that our scheme provides indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack and unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attack in random oracle model. Compared with two other Diffie-Hellman based signcryption schemes proposed by Barbosa and Farshim (BF) and another by Yin and Liang (YL), our scheme consumes 46 % and 8 % less energy during signcryption than BF and YL scheme respectively.     

RACOON: A Multiuser QoS Design for Mobile Wireless Body Area Networks

In this study, Random Contention-based Resource Allocation (RACOON) medium access control (MAC) protocol is proposed to support the quality of service (QoS) for multi-user mobile wireless body area networks (WBANs). Different from existing QoS designs that focus on a single WBAN, a multiuser WBAN QoS should further consider both inter-WBAN interference and inter-WBAN priorities. Similar problems have been studied in both overlapped wireless local area networks (WLANs) and Bluetooth piconets that need QoS supports. However, these solutions are designed for non-medical transmissions that do not consider any priority scheme for medical applications. Most importantly, these studies focus on only static or low mobility networks. Network mobility of WBANs will introduce unnecessary inter-network collisions and energy waste, which are not considered by these solutions. The proposed multiuser-QoS protocol, RACOON, simultaneously satisfies the inter WBAN QoS requirements and overcomes the performance degradation caused by WBAN mobility. Simulation results verify that RACOON provides better latency and energy control, as compared with WBAN QoS protocols without considering the inter-WBAN requirements.     

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.     

Energy-aware Gateway Selection for Increasing the Lifetime of Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

A Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) is composed of a set of sensor nodes, placed on, near or within a human body. WBASNs opt to continuously monitor the health conditions of individuals under medical risk, e.g., elders and chronically ill people, without keeping them in a hospital or restraining their motion. A WBASN needs to stay connected to local or wide area networks using wireless technologies in order to send sensor readings to a medical center. The WBASN nodes are implanted within the human body and would thus have limited energy supply. Since the mission of the WBASN is very critical, increasing the lifetime of nodes is essential in order to maintain both practicality and effectiveness. This paper presents a new Gateway Selection Algorithm (GSA) that factors in the use of energy harvesting technologies and dynamically picks the most suitable WBASN node that serves as a gateway to other wireless networks. The goal of GSA is to balance the load among the nodes by adaptively changing the gateway node in WBASN depending on the energy reserve of nodes. Computer modeling and simulations of the proposed GSA are carried out using OPNET. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed GSA approach.     

A Novel Medium Access Control Protocol with Low Delay and Traffic Adaptivity for Wireless Body Area Networks

IEEE 802.15.4 technology provides one solution for low-rate short range communications. Based on the integrated superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.4, a novel low-delay traffic-adaptive medium access control (LDTA-MAC) protocol for wireless body area networks (WBANs) is proposed in the paper. In LDTA-MAC, the guaranteed time slots (GTSs) are allocated dynamically according to the traffic load. At the same time, the active portion of superframe is kept to be a reasonable duration to decrease the energy consumption of the network devices. Moreover, for the successful GTS requests, the related data packets are transmitted in the current superframe instead of waiting more time to reduce the average packet delay. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the network performance and verify our protocol design. Comparing with IEEE 802.15.4, the results reveal LDTA-MAC accommodates more devices access to the network and reduces the packet delay obviously without the cost of more energy consumption.     

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.     

A Privacy Preservation Secure Cross Layer Protocol Design for IoT Based Wireless Body Area Networks Using ECDSA Framework

Internet of Things (IoT) provides the collection of devices in different applications in which Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is placed an crucial role. The WBAN is a wireless sensor network consisting of sensor nodes that is collected from IoT which is implanted in the human body to remotely monitor the patient’s physiological signals without affecting their routine work. During emergency situations or life-threatening situations there is a need for a better performance to deliver the actual data with an efficient transmission and there is still a challenge in efficient remote monitoring. So, in this paper an application for cross layer protocol design architecture of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) has been proposed. It replaces the protocol architecture of WBAN (IEEE 802.15.6), WMAN (IEEE 802.16), and 3G, WLAN (IEEE 802.11) or wired networks. The lightweight secure system provides secure data transmission and access control mechanisms by using ECDA-based proxy signature algorithm. The efficiency of the system is implemented using simulation models that were developed using NS-2, and the results obtained shows an optimum solution in terms of delay, PDR, throughput, jitter, packet transmission time, dropping ratio and packet delivery. The viability of the methodology proposed is illustrated by the response.     

Towards Improved Healthcare Performance: Examining Technological Possibilities and Patient Satisfaction with Wireless Body Area Networks

This paper investigates the benefits of using less intrusive wireless technologies for heart monitoring. By replacing well established heart monitoring devices (i.e. Holter) with wireless ECG based Body Area Networks (BAN), improved healthcare performance can be achieved, reflected in (1) high quality ECG recordings during physical activities and (2) increased patient satisfaction. A small scale clinical trial was conducted to compare both technologies and the results illustrate that the wireless ECG monitor was able to detect ECG signals intended for arrhythmia diagnostics. Furthermore, from a patient’s perspective, both technologies were evaluated using three dimensions, namely; hygienic aspects, physical activity, and skin reactions. Results demonstrate that the wireless ECG BAN showed better performance, especially regarding the hygienic aspects. It was also favourable for use during physical activities, and the signal quality of the wireless sensor system demonstrated good performance regarding signal noise and artefact disturbances. This paper concludes that wireless cardiac monitoring systems have significant benefits from a patient’s perspective, and further clinical trials should be conducted to further evaluate the new ECG based BAN system, to identify the possibility of widespread adoption and utilisation of wireless technology for arrhythmia diagnostics.     

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack in Cloud- Assisted Wireless Body Area Networks: A Systematic Literature Review

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology that has shown enormous potential in improving the quality of healthcare, and has thus found a broad range of medical applications from ubiquitous health monitoring to emergency medical response systems. The huge amount of highly sensitive data collected and generated by WBAN nodes requires an ascendable and secure storage and processing infrastructure. Given the limited resources of WBAN nodes for storage and processing, the integration of WBANs and cloud computing may provide a powerful solution. However, despite the benefits of cloud-assisted WBAN, several security issues and challenges remain. Among these, data availability is the most nagging security issue. The most serious threat to data availability is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that directly affects the all-time availability of a patient’s data. The existing solutions for standalone WBANs and sensor networks are not applicable in the cloud. The purpose of this review paper is to identify the most threatening types of DDoS attacks affecting the availability of a cloud-assisted WBAN and review the state-of-the-art detection mechanisms for the identified DDoS attacks.     

A Green Media Access Method for IEEE 802.15.6 Wireless Body Area Network

It is of utmost importance to conserve battery energy to the maximum possible extent in WBAN nodes while collecting and transferring medical data. The IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN standard does not specify any method to conserve energy. This paper focuses on a method to conserve energy in IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN nodes when using CSMA/CA, while simultaneously restricting data delivery delay to the required value as specified in medical applications. The technique is to allow the nodes to sleep all the times except for receiving beacons and for transmitting data frames whenever a data frame enters an empty buffer. The energy consumed by the nodes and the average latency of data frame for periodical arrival of data are found out analytically. The analytical results are validated and also the proposed method is compared with other energy conserving schemes, using Castalia simulation studies. The proposed method shows superior performance in both device lifetime and latency of emergency medical data.     

A Secure Cloud-Assisted Wireless Body Area Network in Mobile Emergency Medical Care System

Recent advances in medical treatment and emergency applications, the need of integrating wireless body area network (WBAN) with cloud computing can be motivated by providing useful and real time information about patients’ health state to the doctors and emergency staffs. WBAN is a set of body sensors carried by the patient to collect and transmit numerous health items to medical clouds via wireless and public communication channels. Therefore, a cloud-assisted WBAN facilitates response in case of emergency which can save patients’ lives. Since the patient’s data is sensitive and private, it is important to provide strong security and protection on the patient’s medical data over public and insecure communication channels. In this paper, we address the challenge of participant authentication in mobile emergency medical care systems for patients supervision and propose a secure cloud-assisted architecture for accessing and monitoring health items collected by WBAN. For ensuring a high level of security and providing a mutual authentication property, chaotic maps based authentication and key agreement mechanisms are designed according to the concept of Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which depends on the CMBDLP and CMBDHP problems. Security and performance analyses show how the proposed system guaranteed the patient privacy and the system confidentiality of sensitive medical data while preserving the low computation property in medical treatment and remote medical monitoring.     

An Efficient Remote Authentication Scheme for Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless body area network (WBAN) provide a mechanism of transmitting a persons physiological data to application providers e.g. hospital. Given the limited range of connectivity associated with WBAN, an intermediate portable device e.g. smartphone, placed within WBAN’s connectivity, forwards the data to a remote server. This data, if not protected from an unauthorized access and modification may be lead to poor diagnosis. In order to ensure security and privacy between WBAN and a server at the application provider, several authentication schemes have been proposed. Recently, Wang and Zhang proposed an authentication scheme for WBAN using bilinear pairing. However, in their scheme, an application provider could easily impersonate a client. In order to overcome this weakness, we propose an efficient remote authentication scheme for WBAN. In terms of performance, our scheme can not only provide a malicious insider security, but also reduce running time of WBAN (client) by 51 % as compared to Wang and Zhang scheme.     

Provably Secure Heterogeneous Access Control Scheme for Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless body area network (WBAN) provides a medium through which physiological information could be harvested and transmitted to application provider (AP) in real time. Integrating WBAN in a heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem would enable an AP to monitor patients from anywhere and at anytime. However, the IoT roadmap of interconnected ‘Things’ is still faced with many challenges. One of the challenges in healthcare is security and privacy of streamed medical data from heterogeneously networked devices. In this paper, we first propose a heterogeneous signcryption scheme where a sender is in a certificateless cryptographic (CLC) environment while a receiver is in identity-based cryptographic (IBC) environment. We then use this scheme to design a heterogeneous access control protocol. Formal security proof for indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack and unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attack in random oracle model is presented. In comparison with some of the existing access control schemes, our scheme has lower computation and communication cost.     

Body Area Networks for Ubiquitous Healthcare Applications: Opportunities and Challenges

Body Area Networks integrated into mHealth systems are becoming a mature technology with unprecedented opportunities for personalized health monitoring and management. Potential applications include early detection of abnormal conditions, supervised rehabilitation, and wellness management. Such integrated mHealth systems can provide patients with increased confidence and a better quality of life, and promote healthy behavior and health awareness. Automatic integration of collected information and user’s inputs into research databases can provide medical community with opportunity to search for personalized trends and group patterns, allowing insights into disease evolution, the rehabilitation process, and the effects of drug therapy. A new generation of personalized monitoring systems will allow users to customize their systems and user interfaces and to interact with their social networks. With emergence of first commercial body area network systems, a number of system design issues are still to be resolved, such as seamless integration of information and ad-hoc interaction with ambient sensors and other networks, to enable their wider acceptance. In this paper we present state of technology, discuss promising new trends, opportunities and challenges of body area networks for ubiquitous health monitoring applications.     

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) Design Techniques and Performance Evaluation

In recent years interest in the application of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for patient monitoring applications has grown significantly. A WBAN can be used to develop patient monitoring systems which offer flexibility to medical staff and mobility to patients. Patients monitoring could involve a range of activities including data collection from various body sensors for storage and diagnosis, transmitting data to remote medical databases, and controlling medical appliances, etc. Also, WBANs could operate in an interconnected mode to enable remote patient monitoring using telehealth/e-health applications. A WBAN can also be used to monitor athletes’ performance and assist them in training activities. For such applications it is very important that a WBAN collects and transmits data reliably, and in a timely manner to a monitoring entity. In order to address these issues, this paper presents WBAN design techniques for medical applications. We examine the WBAN design issues with particular emphasis on the design of MAC protocols and power consumption profiles of WBAN. Some simulation results are presented to further illustrate the performances of various WBAN design techniques.     

基于医疗监护的无线体域网接收系统设计

介绍基于医疗监护无线体域网的体表节点人体信道通信技术,从整体结构、解调方式两方面阐述抗中心频率偏差、抗时钟频率偏移的无线体域网通信接收系统设计,测试并验证系统性能。     

Energy-Efficient Key Distribution Using Electrocardiograph Biometric Set for Secure Communications in Wireless Body Healthcare Networks

Wireless body sensor network (WBSN) has gained significant interests as an important infrastructure for real-time biomedical healthcare systems, while the security of the sensitive health information becomes one of the main challenges. Due to the constraints of limited power, traditional cryptographic key distribution schemes are not suitable for WBSN. This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient approach, BodyKey, which can distribute the keys using the electrocardiograph biometrics. BodyKey represents the biometric features as ordered set, and deals with the biometric variations using set reconciliation. In this way, only limited necessary information needs to be communicated for key agreement, and the total energy consumption for key distribution can thus be reduced. Experiments on the PhysioBank Database show that BodyKey can perform an energy consumption rate of 0.01 mJ/bit with an equal accuracy rate of 97.28%, allowing the system to be used as an energy-efficient key distribution scheme for secure communications in WBSN.     

TraPy-MAC: Traffic Priority Aware Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Body Area Network

Recently, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has witnessed significant attentions in research and product development due to the growing number of sensor-based applications in healthcare domain. Design of efficient and effective Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is one of the fundamental research themes in WBAN. Static on-demand slot allocation to patient data is the main approach adopted in the design of MAC protocol in literature, without considering the type of patient data specifically the level of severity on patient data. This leads to the degradation of the performance of MAC protocols considering effectiveness and traffic adjustability in realistic medical environments. In this context, this paper proposes a Traffic Priority-Aware MAC (TraPy-MAC) protocol for WBAN. It classifies patient data into emergency and non-emergency categories based on the severity of patient data. The threshold value aided classification considers a number of parameters including type of sensor, body placement location, and data transmission time for allocating dedicated slots patient data. Emergency data are not required to carry out contention and slots are allocated by giving the due importance to threshold value of vital sign data. The contention for slots is made efficient in case of non-emergency data considering threshold value in slot allocation. Moreover, the slot allocation to emergency and non-emergency data are performed parallel resulting in performance gain in channel assignment. Two algorithms namely, Detection of Severity on Vital Sign data (DSVS), and ETS Slots allocation based on the Severity on Vital Sign (ETS-SVS) are developed for calculating threshold value and resolving the conflicts of channel assignment, respectively. Simulations are performed in ns2 and results are compared with the state-of-the-art MAC techniques. Analysis of results attests the benefit of TraPy-MAC in comparison with the state-of-the-art MAC in channel assignment in realistic medical environments.