Effective methodologies for security and privacy in wireless body area networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is used in healthcare to increase the value of patient s life and value of healthcare services. The biosensor based approach in medical care system makes it difficult to react to the patients within a short response time. The medical care unit does not organize the accessing of ubiquitous broadband connections full time and consequently the level of security is not high always. Hence there are issues and challenges in the security, privacy, response time and energy usage in WBAN. A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network of low cost and small size devices represented as nodes, deployed in a wide region which senses the background conditions and transform the electrical signals collected from the monitored domain via wireless manner. WBAN is a limited edition of the WSN. Based on the study done by Shikha Pathania et al. (2014) and Ashwini Singh et al.(2013), the issues and challenges which are applicable to WSN and WBAN have been found to be different in terms of deployment, data rate, mobility, latency, portability and inactivity. So study and research are required specifically for WBAN. Chan et al. (2012) created Smart Wearable Systems to monitor health. Smart Wearable Systems for Health Monitoring (SWS-HM) are used for continuously monitoring the health of patients. In SWS-HM, the personal communication and healthcare assistance are provided by telemetric or wearable systems. This enables minimum cost for wearable systems and becomes effective for continuous monitoring (i.e. 24 hours) of health both indoors and outdoors. Ho et al. (2012) has planned an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) body sensor node to inspect the sensible results of UWB-based wireless body area network. The performance depends on the position of sensors and control unit on the human body and is a necessary part of the outcomes of wireless body area network system. It provides reliable transmission of patient s information with less transmission power levels. But, multipath components utilize more energy newline