PMAS: A proposed mutual authentication scheme for wireless body area networks

Power efficient ultra-wideband based wireless communication for wireless body area network applications

Developments in wireless communications and wearable devices have facilitated the emergence of a network of tiny sensors embedded in, on or around human body called Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). Over the last decade, WBAN has increasingly been playing a vital role in modern medical systems because of its potential to revolutionize healthcare delivery. The data collected by the sensors contain sensitive information and are transmitted via wireless channels. However, the openness of these channels makes WBAN vulnerable to attacks by unauthorized users. Therefore, secure authentication and data encryption schemes in WBAN are essential. The resource constraint nature of the sensors makes traditional cryptographic schemes unsuitable. Consequently, authentication schemes based on channel characteristics are proposed, which are more suitable with fewer requirements. However, existing approaches do not consider mutual authentication as well as passive/active attacks. Motivated by these limitations, we propose in this paper, a mutual authentication and data encryption scheme based on signal propagation characteristics and enhanced butterfly algorithm. To validate the effectiveness of our scheme, we conducted an extensive real-world experiment involving 5 volunteers in indoor and outdoor areas, under distinct scenarios. We further conducted security and performance analyses to validate the effectiveness of our scheme in terms of resources and its resilience to various attacks. The results of the experiments and the analyses show that our scheme could mutually identify legitimate users and protect user data against active/passive eavesdropping attacks with minimal overhead.

Wireless Sensor Networks for Pervasive Health Applications Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable many new applications. Sensor nodes are developing into tiny, light and inexpensive devices, paving the road for widespread use. Health is one of the domains that can greatly benefit from WSNs. Advances in ultra-low power tiny wireless (bio-)sensor devices allow deployment on (and in) a human body during daily life. This forms a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) to measure, process, and transmit a variety of physical and physiological data. The combination of WBANs and ambient WSNs provides an infrastructure for pervasive health applications such as elderly care, remote healthcare monitoring of patients with chronic diseases such as COPD, and post-surgery recovery monitoring. Such technology enables patients to live more independently and still receive sufficient care. It also reduces the cost of medical care. Exploiting well-known general-purpose protocol stacks in WSNs benefits from maturity and technology availability, but suffers from being sub-optimal for specific applications. The protocols need to be adapted to specifications of the target application to fulfill the application requirements. Mobility of individual nodes and of clusters of nodes (WBANs), heterogeneity of sensing characteristics and of quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, and dynamics in the network and its context are special characteristics of pervasive health application. Energy consumption of nodes should be minimized to extend the life-time of the networks and to reduce maintenance cost. This thesis makes the following contributions. An application-aware Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, a data prioritization mechanism for data dissemination, and an adaptive intra-WBAN communication protocol are proposed, all aiming to prepare communication protocols for pervasive health applications. The performance of the protocols is studied through real-world experiments with a large-scale ambient WSN and several persons with WBANs. The experiments are complemented with computer simulations to evaluate the protocols in a wider range of use-cases. Models, tools and methods needed to assess performance of the proposed protocols, including a mobility model for WBANs, are developed. We consider WSNs that exhibit high mobility in the form of moving clusters of nodes (WBANs). The MAC layer needs to efficiently manage medium access in the presence

Purpose A wireless body area network (WBAN) plays a crucial role in the health-care domain. With the emergence of technologies like the internet of things, there is increased usage of WBAN for providing quality health services. With wearable devices and sensors associated with human body, patient’s vital signs are captured and sent to doctor. The WBAN has number of sensor nodes that are resource constrained. The communications among the nodes are very crucial as human health information is exchanged. The purpose of this paper aims to have Quality of Service (QoS) with energy aware and control overhead aware. Maximizing network lifetime is also essential for the improved quality in services. There are many existing studies on QoS communications in WBAN. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, with the aim of energy-efficient WBAN for QoS, a cross-layer routing protocol is designed and implemented. A cross-layer routing protocol that is ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV)-based, energy and control overhead-aware (AODV-ECOA) is designed and implemented for energy-efficient routing in WBAN. The cross-layer design that involves multiple layers of open systems interconnection reference model, which will improve energy efficiency and thus QoS. Findings Implementation is simulated using the network simulator tool, i.e. NS-2. The proposed cross-layer routing protocol AODV-ECOA shows least bandwidth requirement by control packets, leading to less control overhead, highest packet delivery ratio and energy efficiency. The experimental results revealed that AODV-ECOA shows better performance over existing protocols such as AODV and POLITIC. Originality/value An efficient control overhead reduction algorithm is proposed for reducing energy consumption further and improves performance of WBAN communications to realize desired QoS.

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a communication technology, which aims providing both medical and consumer electronics services through sensor devices in, on, or around a human body. Due to the absence of the IEEE 802.15.6-based RF modules, the IEEE 802.15.4, a typical low-power communication technology of which requirements are similar, is considered to implement WBANs. In the case where a lot of WBANs coexist, meanwhile, collisions and signal attenuations may lead to their communication performance degradation. However, the IEEE 802.15.4 does not provide any solutions to solve coexistence problems, and thus, coexistence mitigation schemes for the IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs are necessary. In this paper, we perform preliminary experiments to identify aspects of coexistence problem among the coexisting IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs. Based on the results of preliminary experiments, we also propose a hybrid channel access scheme to mitigate coexistence problems in WBANs. The proposed scheme can be classified into two phases. In the first phase, the proposed scheme provides probabilistic collision avoidance on the contention-free period. When the pre-defined requirements of reliability cannot be satisfied with performing the first phase, the proposed scheme performs the second phase, which helps to mitigate collision or interference through changing channel access method. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we implement our scheme and perform experiments by comparing with an IEEE 802.15.4-based WBAN.

Balancing emergency message dissemination and network lifetime in wireless body area network using ant colony optimization and Bayesian game formulation

Wireless body area network (WBAN) being a sub-domain of wireless sensor network (WSN) is a new emerging technology for healthcare applications. A WBAN consists of low-power tiny wireless nodes placed on or around the human body that continuously observe vital health signs of a patient. These sensors are capable of sending information of physiological parameters taken from human body to other devices for diagnosis procedures and prescription. WBAN provides ubiquitous healthcare services and enables greater mobility without restricting human normal activities, as the medical personnel can observe the patient health conditions based on the data received through the wireless network. This research work provides a WBAN based healthcare monitoring system that can provide the electrocardiogram (ECG), heartbeat, and human body temperature information. The wireless transmission of the received data from human body is performed by using Zigbee IEEE802.15.4 communication standard. The physiological data will be communicated to remote medical server where data is stored and analyzed. In case any disease is diagnosed, medical personnel can provide immediate assistance to the patients.

Anonymous mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for wearable sensors in wireless body area networks

Nowadays, the design and construction of efficient internet of things (IoTs) has become a new strategies for improving living quality of all aspects. Emerging as one of the most significant extension of medical IoTs, wireless body area networks (WBANs) is capable of monitoring crucial physiological and behavioral information through wearable sensors, offering a new paradigm for the next-generation healthcare systems. As a matter of fact, due to the inherent open wireless communicating characteristics, data security and user privacy issues of WBANs have attracted attentions from both industry and academia. So far, lots of relevant researches emphasize on secure transmission and privacy protection. However, the computation and communication limitations for individual WBAN sensor have not been taken proper consideration. Moreover, the implementation of cloud computing infrastructure has provided WBANs with superior transmission and processing qualities. Emphasizing on the above issues, this paper construct a pairing-free authentication and sensor cooperation scheme in cloud-assisted WBANs, where most of the practical requirements for WBAN sensors could be satisfied. Our design guarantee the sensor anonymity in the whole transmission session. Note that our design offers pairing-free validation procedure followed with active sensor cooperation, which is suitable for massive sensor scenarios. The security analysis proves that our designed scheme is capable of achieving desired security properties and offer adequate resistances to the charted malicious attacks. Meanwhile, security comparison demonstrates that the proposed protocol is secure compared with the state-of-the-arts.

Decoding motion aftereffects from activity patterns in human visual cortex

In humanware applications, resource constrained sensor devices are tactically placed on human body to form Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). Then the WBAN is used for monitoring biometrics and movements of human body. Keeping in mind the resource constrained devices, WBANs are treated just like wireless sensor networks when considering a solution for key management. However, WBANs differ from traditional wireless sensor networks in scale, topology and security requirements. Also, the WBANs can also use random values from biometric measurements for the generation of keys. These differences render the key management schemes of WSNs inefficient and overly complex for WBANs scenario. Therefore, we propose a key management scheme that is efficient and fulfills the security requirements of WBAN.

Recent years have seen a huge growth in Wireless body area network (WBAN) for monitoring human health, for processing and transmission of data and information. In WBAN tiny sensors are attached on the human body that monitor different parameters of the body and then send data further to the hospital server with the help of internet. This technology will make the human life more healthy and cheerful. WBAN faces many stringent problems in phases of delay, power, temperature and community lifetime which need to be taken into intention inside the design of various routing protocols. These routing protocol play a critical position in the general system performance in phases of delay like energy consumption, and temperature. WBAN is vital in radical look at on existing routing protocols. Mainly this paper contributes to review existing Ad-Hoc routing protocols. This paper also provides an overview on WBAN in health care, architecture of WBAN, non-medical and medical application and discussion about ad-hoc network routing protocol for WBAN.

Secure communication over wireless body area network (WBAN) is a key issue in the design and deployment of WBAN systems, in which the authentication of sensor node is a critical process. Conventional authentication schemes are not suitable to the sensor node because of the limitations of memory, computational power and energy in the node. In order to provide an efficient method to verify the identity of sender sensor nodes of WBAN, in this paper a lightweight authentication scheme, TinyZKP, based on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is proposed and implemented on TinyOS-based sensor nodes. Our experimental results show that, compared to two ECDSA-based authentication schemes in TinyECC and WM-ECC, the TinyZKP runs 1.9 and 1.4 times faster and the energy cost is reduced by 48 % and 28 %, respectively.

Healthcare: A priority-based energy harvesting scheme for managing sensor nodes in WBANs

Objective: To review different key agreement schemes which are used to establish Wireless body area network (WBAN) on the basis of identified attacks and also evaluate the schemes on performance parameters. Method: In this paper, an overview of WBAN, its architecture, difference between WSN and WBAN, IEEE 802.15.6 specifications of WBAN, attacks in the environment and security essentials are discussed at first. It further divides the key agreement schemes into four classes and provides an extensive review of the schemes on the basis of distinct parameters viz. data confidentiality, node authentication, data integrity, mutual authentication, unforgeability, unlinkability, forward/backward secrecy, scalability, freshness, dos attack and node capture attack. Schemes are searched using the keywords- (“Traditional Key Agreement Scheme” OR “Physiological Key Agreement Scheme” OR “Signal Based Key Agreement Scheme” OR “Hybrid Key Agreement Scheme” OR “Security in Key Agreement Scheme”) AND (“Wireless Body Area Network” OR “WBAN” OR “Body Area Network” OR “BAN” OR “Body Sensor Network” OR “BSN” OR “Medical Body Area Network” OR “MBAN”). The papers are shortlisted around long stretches of 2003-2021 with a focus on recent work from IEEE Xplore, Springer, Science Direct, ACM, MDPI and Google Scholar databases. Schemes are analyzed against the mentioned attacks and the result of the comparative analysis is shown using tables and chart tools graphically. Findings: The wide coverage of the schemes in this review provides in-depth exposure to the shortcomings of the different schemes against the listed attacks which will provide a road map to the researchers to develop secure schemes in the future. Moreover, maximum schemes do not consider all the three aspects of performance viz. memory efficiency, computational efficiency and energy efficiency which are the foremost parameters in resource scarce environment of WBAN. Novelty: This review is unique as it analyzes the distinct key agreement schemes under specific attacks found in the literature while other review papers discuss the general aspects of the security threats and corresponding counter measures in WBAN environment. It also provides the performance analysis of the key management schemes which are missing from other review works. Keywords: WBAN; IOT; Bio sensors; Security; Privacy; Attacks; Encryption; Key agreement schemes; IEEE 802.15.6