A Secure Low-Delay Protocol forWireless Body Area Networks
Dave Singelée, Benoît Latré, Bart Braem, Michael Peeters, Marijke De Soete, Peter De Cleyn, Bart Prenee, Ingrid Moerman and Chris Blondia
The development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) for wireless sensing and monitoring of a person’s vital functions, is an enabler in providing better personal health care whilst enhancing the quality of life. A critical factor in the acceptance of WBANsis providing appropriate security and privacy protection of the wireless communication. This paper first describes a general health care platform and pinpoints the security challenges and requirements. Further it proposes and analyzes the CICADA-S protocol, a secure cross-layer protocol for WBANs. It is an extension of CICADA, which is a cross-layer protocol that handles both medium access and the routing of data in WBANs. The CICADA-S protocol is the first integrated solution that copes with threats that occur in this mobile medical monitoring scenario. It is shown that the integration of key management and secure, privacy preserving communication techniques within the CICADA-S protocol has low impact on the power consumption and throughput.
Keywords: Wireless Body Area Network, CICADA-S, key management, location privacy.