Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being used to facilitate monitoring of patients in hospital and home environments. These systems consist of a variety of different components/sensors and many processes like clustering, routing, security, and self-organization. Routing is necessary for medical-based WSNs because it allows remote data delivery and it facilitates network scalability in large hospitals. However, routing entails several problems, mainly due to the open nature of wireless networks, and these need to be addressed. This paper looks at two of the problems that arise due to wireless routing between the nodes and access points of a medical WSN (for IoT use): black hole and selective forwarding (SF) attacks. A solution to the former can readily be provided through the use of cryptographic hashes, while the latter makes use of a neighbourhood watch and threshold-based analysis to detect and correct SF attacks. The scheme proposed here is capable of detecting a selective forwarding attack with over 96% accuracy and successfully identifying the malicious node with 83% accuracy.
Highlights
For several years wireless sensor networks have been gaining popularity in the healthcare industry among other domains
This may lead to garbled transmissions. For both solutions the authors did not use any attacker nodes and they verified packets by verifying the routes only, which could result in false positives. They did not address the problem associated with a collaborative black hole attack, which involves the collaboration between multiple malicious nodes to bring down a network, as is the usual scenario in real world implementations
The healthcare industry requires the technological advances in Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and IoT applications to provide for the future demands and needs of patients and medical staff
Summary
For several years wireless sensor networks have been gaining popularity in the healthcare industry among other domains. A healthcare monitoring system [1,2] may need higher reliability than other systems This is because the main aim of a patient monitoring system is data delivery. The sensors sample raw data and send the values to the nodes which may convert data and encrypt it for security. Following this the nodes elect a cluster head and its backup i.e., a shadow (SH). The CH aggregates the encrypted data and sends it to the nearest AP which in turn sends it to the BS through a secure multi-hop routing process.
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