A Survey on Trust Management for WBAN: Investigations and Future Directions

The rapid uptake of the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) and their services poses unprecedented security requirements. WBAN are evolving to support these requirements. Fulfilling these tasks is challenging as their mobile context is increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and evolving. One potential solution to meet the WBAN security requirements is trust management that helps to reach a more secure and adaptable WBAN environment. Accordingly, this article aims to serve as a brief survey of trust management approaches within intra-WBAN and inter-WBAN. For that, we first summarize trust management concepts, discuss WBAN challenges and classify the attacks on WBAN trust management models. Subsequently, we detail and compare the existing trust based approaches in a WBAN context. We pinpoint their limitations and provide a new classification of these different approaches. We also propose a set of best practices that may help the reader to build a robust and an efficient trust management framework. We complete this survey by highlighting the open future directions and perspectives for research.

Certificateless pairing-free authentication scheme for wireless body area network in healthcare management system

With the current advancement in technology, the use of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has become popular in the healthcare management. They provide a mechanism to collect and transmit physiological data to healthcare providers in remote locations. With the need to secure healthcare data becoming a global concern, mechanisms must be put in place to ensure secure communication of physiological data collected in WBANs. This paper, presents a new authentication scheme for WBANs based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Sensor nodes used in WBANs are resource constraint and for that reason, the proposed scheme is both certificateless and pairing-free. We compared the efficiency of our proposed authentication scheme with other related schemes and found that our scheme had considerable efficiency in terms of communication cost and running time.

Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA Protocol for WBAN Medical Scenario through DTMC Model

The newly drafted IEEE 802.15.6 standard for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) has been concentrating on a numerous medical and non-medical applications. Such short range wireless communication standard offers ultra-low power consumption with variable data rates from few Kbps to Mbps in, on or around the proximity of the human body. In this paper, the performance analysis of carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme based on IEEE 802.15.6 standard in terms of throughput, reliability, clear channel assessment (CCA) failure probability, packet drop probability, and end-to-end delay has been presented. We have developed a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) to significantly evaluate the performances of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA under non-ideal channel condition having saturated traffic condition including node wait time and service time. We also visualize that, as soon as the payload length increases the CCA failure probability increases, which results in lower node's reliability. Also, we have calculated the end-to-end delay in order to prioritize the node wait time cause by backoff and retransmission. The user priority (UP) wise DTMC analysis has been performed to show the importance of the standard especially for medical scenario.

A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks for eHealthcare Systems in Residential Environments

Current progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to a base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments.