Trust-Based Data Communication in Wireless Body Area Network for Healthcare Applications

Abstract

A subset of Wireless Sensor Networks, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is an emerging technology. WBAN is a collection of tiny pieces of wireless body sensors with small computational capability, communicating short distances using ZigBee or Bluetooth, an application mainly in the healthcare industry like remote patient monitoring. The small piece of sensor monitors health factors like body temperature, pulse rate, ECG, heart rate, etc., and communicates to the base station or central coordinator for aggregation or data computation. The final data is communicated to remote monitoring devices through the internet or cloud service providers. The main challenge for this technology is energy consumption and secure communication within the network and the possibility of attacks executed by malicious nodes, creating problems for the network. This system proposes a suitable trust model for secure communication in WBAN based on node trust and data trust. Node trust is calculated using direct trust calculation and node behaviours. The data trust is calculated using consistent data success and data aging. The performance is compared with an existing protocol like Trust Evaluation (TE)-WBAN and Body Area Network (BAN)-Trust which is not a cryptographic technique. The protocol is lightweight and has low overhead. The performance is rated best for Throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio, and Minimum delay. With extensive simulation on-off attacks, Selfishness attacks, sleeper attacks, and Message suppression attacks were prevented.