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. 2012;12(9):12606-33.
doi: 10.3390/s120912606. Epub 2012 Sep 17.

Efficient security mechanisms for mHealth applications using wireless body sensor networks

Prasan Kumar Sahoo  1
Affiliations

Efficient security mechanisms for mHealth applications using wireless body sensor networks

Prasan Kumar Sahoo. Sensors (Basel). 2012.

Abstract

Recent technological advances in wireless communications and physiological sensing allow miniature, lightweight, ultra-low power, intelligent monitoring devices, which can be integrated into a Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) for health monitoring. Physiological signals of humans such as heartbeats, temperature and pulse can be monitored from a distant location using tiny biomedical wireless sensors. Hence, it is highly essential to combine the ubiquitous computing with mobile health technology using wireless sensors and smart phones to monitor the well-being of chronic patients such as cardiac, Parkinson and epilepsy patients. Since physiological data of a patient are highly sensitive, maintaining its confidentiality is highly essential. Hence, security is a vital research issue in mobile health (mHealth) applications, especially if a patient has an embarrassing disease. In this paper a three tier security architecture for the mHealth application is proposed, in which light weight data confidentiality and authentication protocols are proposed to maintain the privacy of a patient. Moreover, considering the energy and hardware constraints of the wireless body sensors, low complexity data confidential and authentication schemes are designed. Performance evaluation of the proposed architecture shows that they can satisfy the energy and hardware limitations of the sensors and still can maintain the secure fabrics of the wireless body sensor networks. Besides, the proposed schemes can outperform in terms of energy consumption, memory usage and computation time over standard key establishment security scheme.

Keywords: authentication; confidentiality; mHealth; security; wireless body sensor networks.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The proposed three tier Wireless Body Sensor Networks.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Communication architecture of three tier Wireless Body Sensor Networks for indoor mHealth applications.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
The indoor mHealth with different types of nodes that form the WBSN.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Logical view of the three tiered network architecture of WBSNs.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
The hierarchical key sharing architecture of the whole network.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Evaluation of energy consumption with different number of nodes.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Evaluation of energy consumption with computation time.
Figure 8.
Figure 8.
Evaluation of energy consumption with different message sizes in bits.
Figure 9.
Figure 9.
Evaluation of computation time with different number of nodes.
Figure 10.
Figure 10.
Evaluation of computation time with different packet size in bits.
Figure 11.
Figure 11.
Evaluation of memory usage with different number of nodes.
Figure 12.
Figure 12.
Evaluation of memory usage with different packet size in bits.
Figure 13.
Figure 13.
Control packet overhead with different number of nodes.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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