An efficient MAC-based scheme against pollution attacks in XOR network coding-enabled WBANs for remote patient monitoring systems

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) play a pivotal role to remote patient monitoring which is one of the main applications of m-Health. However, WBANs comprise a subset of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and thus, they inherit the limitations of WSNs in terms of communication bandwidth, reliability, and power consumption that should be addressed so that WBANs can reach their full potential. Towards this direction, XOR network coding (NC) is a promising solution for WBANs. Nevertheless, XOR NC is vulnerable to pollution attacks, where adversaries (i.e., compromised intermediate nodes) inject into the network corrupted packets that prevent the destination nodes from decoding correctly. This has as a result not only network resource waste but also energy waste at the intermediate nodes. In this sense, pollution attacks comprise a serious threat against WBANs (i.e., resource-constrained wireless networks) that should be addressed so that WBANs can reap the benefits of XOR NC. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient message authentication code (MAC)-based scheme that provides resistance against pollution attacks in XOR NC-enabled WBANs for remote patient monitoring systems. Our proposed scheme makes use of a number of MACs which are appended to the end of each native packet. Our results show that the proposed MAC-based scheme is more efficient compared to other competitive schemes for securing XOR NC against pollution attacks in resource-constrained wireless networks, in terms of communication bandwidth and computational complexity.