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.     

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 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.     

A WBAN-based Real-time Electroencephalogram Monitoring System: Design and Implementation

In this study, a flexible wireless body area network (WBAN) node platform has been designed and implemented based on the Zigbee technology. In order to provide wide range WBAN for health monitoring, a Zigbee/Internet Gateway (ZiGW) has also been developed rather than using a PDA or a host PC to connect different WBANs by using the Internet as the communication infrastructure. The proposed body sensor node platform promises a cost-effective, flexible platform for developing physical sensor node in real-time health monitoring. The ZiGW can provide an effective method to connect WBAN with the Internet. In this work, we present the implementation of an Electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring system using the proposed methods. In this proposed system, real-time EEG signals can be remotely monitored by physicians via Internet, and the collected EEG data is stored in the online EEG database which can be shared with physicians or researchers for further analysis.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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 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.     

A Comprehensive Study of Channel Estimation for WBAN-based Healthcare Systems: Feasibility of Using Multiband UWB

Wireless personal area network (WPAN) is an emerging in wireless technology for short range indoor and outdoor communication applications. A more specific category of WPAN is the wireless body area network (WBAN) used for health monitoring. On the other hand, multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultra-wideband (UWB) comes with a number of desirable features at the physical layer for wireless communications, for example, very high data rate. One big challenge in adoption of multiband UWB in WBAN is the fact that channel estimation becomes difficult under the constraint of extremely low transmission power. Moreover, the heterogeneous environment of WBAN causes a dense multipath wireless channel. Therefore, effective channel estimation is required in the receiver of WBAN-based healthcare system that uses multiband UWB. In this paper, we first outline the MB-OFDM UWB system. Then, we present an overview of channel estimation techniques proposed/investigated for multiband UWB communications with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses. Useful suggestions are given to overcome the weaknesses so that these methods can be particularly useful for WBAN channels. Also, we analyze the comparative performances of the techniques using computer simulation in order to find the energy-efficient channel estimation methods for WBAN-based healthcare systems.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks for Healthcare Applications

The use of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in healthcare applications is growing in a fast pace. Numerous applications such as heart rate monitor, blood pressure monitor and endoscopic capsule are already in use. To address the growing use of sensor technology in this area, a new field known as wireless body area networks (WBAN or simply BAN) has emerged. As most devices and their applications are wireless in nature, security and privacy concerns are among major areas of concern. Due to direct involvement of humans also increases the sensitivity. Whether the data gathered from patients or individuals are obtained with the consent of the person or without it due to the need by the system, misuse or privacy concerns may restrict people from taking advantage of the full benefits from the system. People may not see these devices safe for daily use. There may also possibility of serious social unrest due to the fear that such devices may be used for monitoring and tracking individuals by government agencies or other private organizations. In this paper we discuss these issues and analyze in detail the problems and their possible measures.     

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。     

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.     

A New Approach to Predict user Mobility Using Semantic Analysis and Machine Learning

Mobility prediction is a technique in which the future location of a user is identified in a given network. Mobility prediction provides solutions to many day-to-day life problems. It helps in seamless handovers in wireless networks to provide better location based services and to recalculate paths in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET). In the present study, a framework is presented which predicts user mobility in presence and absence of mobility history. Naïve Bayesian classification algorithm and Markov Model are used to predict user future location when user mobility history is available. An attempt is made to predict user future location by using Short Message Service (SMS) and instantaneous Geological coordinates in the absence of mobility patterns. The proposed technique compares the performance metrics with commonly used Markov Chain model. From the experimental results it is evident that the techniques used in this work gives better results when considering both spatial and temporal information. The proposed method predicts user’s future location in the absence of mobility history quite fairly. The proposed work is applied to predict the mobility of medical rescue vehicles and social security systems.     

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.     

A Simulation Study of TaMAC Protocol using Network Simulator 2

A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is expected to play a significant role in future healthcare system. It interconnects low-cost and intelligent sensor nodes in, on, or around a human body to serve a variety of medical applications. It can be used to diagnose and treat patients with chronic diseases such as hypertensions, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. The lightweight sensor nodes integrated in WBAN require low-power operation, which can be achieved using different optimization techniques. We introduce a Traffic-adaptive MAC protocol (TaMAC) for WBAN that supports dual wakeup mechanisms for normal, emergency, and on-demand traffic. In this letter, the TaMAC protocol is simulated using a well-known Network Simulator 2 (NS-2). The problem of multiple emergency nodes is solved using both wakeup radio and CSMA/CA protocol. The power consumption, delay, and throughput performance are closely compared with beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol using extensive simulations.     

A bilinear pairing based anonymous authentication scheme in wireless body area networks for mHealth

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become one of the key components of mobile health (mHealth) which provides 24/7 health monitoring service and greatly improves the quality and efficiency of healthcare. However, users’ concern about the security and privacy of their health information has become one of the major obstacles that impede the wide adoption of WBANs. Anonymous and unlinkable authentication is critical to protect the security and privacy of sensitive physiological information in transit from the client to the application provider. We first show that the anonymous authentication scheme of Wang and Zhang based on bilinear pairing is prone to client impersonation attack. Then, we propose an enhanced anonymous authentication scheme to remedy the flaw in Wang and Zhang’s scheme. We give the security analysis to demonstrate that the enhanced scheme achieves the desired security features and withstands various known attacks.