BARI: A Distributed Key Management Approach for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

In recent years, use of sensors to measure the biometrics and movements of human body have resulted in the design of wireless body area networks (WBAN). Although WBANs consist of resource constrained sensing devices just like other wireless sensor networks (WSN), they differ from WSNs in topology, scale and security requirements. Due to these differences, key management schemes designed for WSNs prove inefficient and unnecessarily complex when applied to WBANs. Considering key management issue, WBANs are also different from WPANs because WBANs can use random biometric measurements as keys. We highlight the differences between WSN and WBAN and propose an efficient key management scheme, which makes use of biometrics and is specifically designed for WBANs domain.