Wireless body area network security issues — Survey

Abstract

Rapid advances in the technologies of wireless communication have led to the evolution and empowerment of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). The health care applications are improved by using WBAN with the usage of different variety of sensors for monitoring the patient in order to diagnose any life threatening diseases. In recent past, several experts have concentrated in building system architecture of WBAN to enhance technical requirements for health care monitoring applications. These wearable systems play an important role since they control the life of patient. Although, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is an emerging key technology which is used for providing real-time monitoring of the patient health condition, WBAN faces various issues like energy efficiency, quality of service (QoS), along with security issues such as loss of data, authentication, access control and privacy issues. Very few researchers have developed strong security system for WBAN in order to protect the life-critical data. However, WBANs face some difficulties in addressing security since it has arduous resource constraints and strident environmental conditions. Hence, security and privacy is a challenging task. In this paper, a general outlook of Wireless Body Area Network and Wireless Sensor Network is given. Further the survey of different protocols using essential security and privacy issues with its pro and cons in WBANs.