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.
Highlights
Over the past decade, advances in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have contributed significantly to the evolution of remote patient monitoring, which is one of the main applications of m-Health
It is worthwhile to mention that the central device, which is called as body gateway (BG), body control unit (BCU), hub or a sink, in some implementations can be a smartphone or a personal digital assistant (PDA)
WBANs comprise a subset of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and 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 [3, 11,12,13,14]
Summary
Advances in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have contributed significantly to the evolution of remote patient monitoring, which is one of the main applications of m-Health. WBANs comprise a subset of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and 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 [3, 11,12,13,14] In this sense, the application of network coding (NC) technology in WBANs has emerged as a promising solution to address these limitations, since it provides significant benefits including network capacity improvement, robustness to packet losses, and lower energy consumption [15,16,17,18]. According to RLNC, each node selects randomly a set of coefficients and uses them to make linear combinations of the incoming packets In these approaches, NC is operated over large finite fields, and they are not efficient for wireless networks. In this paper, we propose an efficient message authentication code (MAC)-based scheme providing resistance against pollution attacks in XOR NC-enabled WBANs for remote patient monitoring systems.
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