Preservation of temporal privacy in body sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) are being widely adopted as building blocks for today's medical monitoring systems. These affordable devices can effectively reduce the overall costs of medical operations and improve the quality of healthcare. Recent studies reveal that an adversary might trace the apparently insignificant traffic statistics of sensor nodes over the air and turn such data to invaluable information so as to breach the privacy of the victim sources. The preservation of patients' privacy is an indispensable requirement for such systems. Many aspects of privacy of these systems have already been studied in the literature. However, context-oriented privacy (especially temporal privacy) has gained less attention. Grounded in the queuing theory, in this paper, we present an efficient method based on time-dependent priority queue to preserve the privacy. At the same time delay constraints of the original packets are maintained and QoS of the transmitted data are not affected. All of the theoretically obtained results have been validated conducting extensive simulation experiments.