Communication In Body Area Networks Research Articles

Security and Privacy Aware Communication in Body Area Networks Using Blockchain Technology

With the adoption of assorted gadgets and technology loaded devices, there is need to work on security and privacy while using such platforms. Now, the focus of concern has turned to the overwhelming secrecy, the high performance security, and integrity of the transactions in the cyber space. In relation to a chain of records which is interlinked and highly encrypted due to the involving hashing and encryption each process, it is known as a blockchain. The blockchain removes the possibility of a fraudulent or accidental tampering with the framework. Blockchain has the ability to store sensor data, as well as the capacity to thwart data falsification. IoT deployment plans are usually complex, and the distributed ledger is particularly well-suited for Internet of Things (IoT) discovery, authentication, and recording of information. Wireless body networks are set to be published here on the use trends of Blockchain deployment using advanced scripting and embedded technology the included incorporation of effectual effects gives the final results as well as opposed to the conventional cryptography approach to security.

A pattern‐reconfigurable antenna design for body area networks communications

This article presents a novel pattern-reconfigurable antenna based on theory of characteristic mode for body area networks (BAN) communication. The radiation pattern of the antenna is able to switch between the omnidirectional pattern and broadside pattern, which can satisfy on-body and off-body communication links simultaneously. An array of 4 × 2 rectangular plates with the off-body communication mode at BAN frequency band is used as the main radiator, and four copper posts between the radiator and the ground are introduced to generate the on-body mode. A simple feeding network is designed to selectively excite the two modes. The footprint of the proposed antenna is 0.43 λ0 × 0.43 λ0 × 0.05 λ0. For demonstration, the proposed antenna has been fabricated and measured both in the free space and on the phantom. The measured results agree well with the simulated ones. Furthermore, the issue of the specific absorption rate (SAR) is studied. The peak SAR values of the proposed antenna in two communication modes are far below the Federal Communication Commission standard. In addition, for practical application, the link budget of the on-body link is investigated. The stable impedance and radiation properties, the low SAR values and the reliable communication ability make the proposed antenna be a suitable candidate for BAN communications.

Design of High Gain Wearable Antenna Based on Wireless Body Area Network Communications

This paper presents a wearable antenna for Wireless Body Area Network communication. A 3×3 array artificial magnetic conductor structure (AMC) is loaded at the bottom of the antenna to reduce the backward radiation and improve the antenna gain. The simulated results show that the antenna can completely meet the working requirements in the bent state. After the addition of AMC array, the maximum gain reaches 7.53 dB, and the SAR value of human tissue can be reduced by about 94%. In addition, we have also processed and tested the antenna. The measured results are in good agreement with the simulated results, and its working bandwidth includes the low-frequency band of the ISM frequency band for WBAN communication, which can meet the working requirements of the antenna.

A compact circular polarized metamaterial‐inspired fabric antenna for WBAN applications

AbstractA compact textile antenna with circular polarization (CP) is implemented for Industrial, Scientific, and Medical applications for wireless body area network with radio band 2.4 GHz. A metamaterial‐inspired radiating element is used to achieve a size reduction of up to 85% against the conventional textile antenna. The CP is obtained by trimming the corners of the radiating element. A rectangular slot place with strip line construct a metamaterial‐inspired radiator and U‐slot is imparted below the radiator by using defected ground structure technique to enhance the antenna bandwidth. This antenna has a physical area of 0.25 × 0.22 × 0.016 λg and is implemented on denim jeans substrate of thickness h = 1.6 mm and εr = 1.6. With the presented design, measured bandwidth of 5.8% (2.37–2.51 GHz). The axial ratio bandwidth of 80 MHz (2.40−2.48 GHz), and a peak gain of 2.70 dBi has been acquired. A perfect matching is observed between measured and simulated results. This novel integrated design is suitable for all body area network communication systems where flexibility and compactness are desirable.

Design and analysis of a compact circularly polarized DRA for off-body communications

A compact single fed circularly polarized dielectric resonator antenna (CPDRA) for off-body communication in wireless body area network (WBAN) applications is proposed. The proposed antenna consists of a modified rectangular DRA made of Al2O3 with a permittivity of εr = 9.8 and fed by a 50-Ω coaxial probe. Two unequal vertical slits are etched off from both the corner edges of the rectangular dielectric resonator to generate TEδ11x and TE1δ1y modes, and to reduce the overall size of the proposed antenna. Moreover, an efficient single layer equivalent phantom model is designed to reduce the simulation time for the analysis of off-WBAN communications. The proposed antenna is fabricated and characterized in free space as well as in on-body environment. It provides measured impedance and axial ratio (AR) bandwidths of 66.19% (4.72–9.39 GHz) and 15.01% (6.22–7.23 GHz) respectively in free space, 65.91% (4.73–9.38 GHz) and 16.02% (6.20–7.28 GHz) respectively in on-body environment. A full ground plane is used to provide unidirectional radiation pattern and greater isolation from the human body with low SAR i.e. 0.397 W/kg and 0.193 W/kg for 1 g and 10 g tissue respectively. These features make the proposed CPDRA is suitable for off-body communication and can easily be integrated in wireless devices.

An efficient anonymous authentication and confidentiality preservation schemes for secure communications in wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is utilized in various healthcare applications due to its ability to provide suitable medical services by exchanging the biological data between the patient and doctor through a network of implantable or wearable medical sensors connected in the patients’ body. The collected data are communicated to the medical personals through open wireless channels. Nevertheless, due to the open wireless nature of communication channels, WBAN is susceptible to security attacks by malicious users. For that reason, secure anonymous authentication and confidentiality preservation schemes are essential in WBAN. Authentication and confidentiality play a significant role while transfers, medical images securely across the network. Since medical images contain highly sensitive information, those images should be transferred securely from the patients to the doctor and vice versa. The proposed anonymous authentication technique helps to ensure the legitimacy of the patient and doctors without disclosing their privacy. Even though various cryptographic encryption techniques such as AES and DES are available to provide confidentiality, the key size and the key sharing are the main problems to provide a worthy level of security. Hence, an efficient affine cipher-based encryption technique is proposed in this paper to offer a high level of confidentiality with smaller key size compared to existing encryption techniques. The security strength of the proposed work against various harmful security attacks is proven in security analysis section to ensure that it provides better security. The storage cost, communication cost and computational cost of the proposed scheme are demonstrated in the performance analysis section elaborately. In connection to this, the computational complexity of the proposed scheme is reduced around 29% compared to the existing scheme.

Wearable Magnetoinductive Waveguide for Low-Loss Wireless Body Area Networks

A novel approach of wearable magnetoinductive waveguide (MIW) is introduced for wireless body area network (WBAN) communications that brings forward significant advances over state-of-the-art. The MIW consists of series of electrically small resonant loops worn upon the human body to support magnetoinductive waves (MI waves) for low-loss/low-power WBANs. Compared to previous approaches, the proposed MIW exhibits 63 dB lower loss, translating conventional power levels of mW down to μW or nW. In this work, we introduce the operating principle of MIW WBAN through underlying theory and dispersion diagrams. The proof-of-concept numerical and experimental results are reported for frequency bands centered around 40.4 and 80.7 MHz for a cylindrical human limb and are found to be in excellent agreement. Design guidelines are extensively discussed to accommodate several possible scenarios (frequency selection, gap between the loops, number of loops, and loop radius) along with practical considerations including loop tilts, anatomical limbs, limb movements, unequal loop gaps, and loop failure. Specific absorption rate (SAR) calculations confirm that this technology is highly safe for human use. A bit error rate (BER) analysis further demonstrates that the MIW can form a high-quality communication channel for WBAN. Overall, the reported approach unveils a new possibility of low-loss and seamless WBANs.

E PAP Enhanced Priority Aware Protocol for Reliable Communication in Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a collection of miniaturized sensing nodes and coordinator nodes. These sensing nodes are placed in, on and around the body for uninterrupted monitoring of physiological data for medical applications. The main application carrier of WBAN is the human body and due to human body movement and physiological changes, the WBAN traffic fluctuates greatly. This network traffic fluctuation requires good network adaptability. In addition to traffic fluctuations, energy consumption is another key problem with WBANs as sensing nodes are very small in size. This paper design a reliable protocol by extending the MAC protocol for reducing energy consumption, PAP algorithm to decide data transmission rate and JOAR algorithm to select the optimize path for the data transmission. The performance of the algorithm outperforms other state of art algorithms to shows its significance.

Flexible Co-Planar Waveguide (CPW)-Fed Y-Shaped Patch UWB Antenna for Off-Body Communication

This paper intends to design an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) antenna for future Internet of Things (IoT) applications for off-body Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) communication. An antenna based on the Y-shaped patch fed using co-planar waveguide (CPW) line, with a full ground plane is designed. It is implemented on two different substrates, namely a 5mm thick Rogers RO4350B and a 5-mm-thick felt textile. Parametric analysis of antenna is performed by changing its critical dimensions and monitoring parameters such as gain, bandwidth, efficiency, radiation pattern when using both substrates. Besides that, the bending effects towards reflection coefficient and radiation patterns are also studied. The final patch size with the Y-shaped slot is 36 × 40 mm2 for both substrates. The antenna is capable of providing coverage for the bands from 8 to 10 GHz. Finally, the antenna designed on RO4350B substrate outperforms the antenna designed on felt by about four times in terms of bandwidth, with 3.3 GHz (7.7–11 GHz).

An optimized security solution based on trust value for multithreaded wireless body area network communication

PurposeSecurity of wireless body area network communication is highly important as it directly impacts human life. This paper aims to focus on battlefield application area of WBAN for implementing security where data must be protected against various possible attacks before delivering over a public network.Design/methodology/approachProviding a strong security system is still a research challenge due to low computational power of used sensors for protecting transmission data. In this paper, the authors have proposed an optimized security solution for multithreaded wireless body area network (MWBAN) using trust-based distributed group key management technique to overcome the drawbacks of existing elliptical curve cryptography-homomorphism (ECC-Homomorphism) scheme as well as coded cooperative data exchange group key management (CCDE_GKM) scheme.FindingsThe proposed optimized security solution is implemented for a particular deployment strategy and test runs are conducted. It is found that when number of attack nodes increased to 25, compared to ECC–Homomorphism and CCDE_GKM for the proposed trust-based distributed group key management technique there is an improvement in performance parameters such as throughput is dropped to only 10.11 Kbps, average delay is just 3.4 s, energy consumption is maximum 29 joules, packet loss is only 12.3 per cent, 90.9 per cent truly can detect attack, only 8.9 per cent false attack detection and 84 per cent true negative detection.Social implicationsMedical care can be provided to human beings with much ease and flexibility via remote monitoring. The user can be at any place, can do his/her everyday work while remotely being monitored of their health parameters and secured transmission of their data to the health-care center for medical service in need.Originality/valueThis paper presents an optimized security solution for MWBAN using trust-based distributed group key management technique where bilinear pairing theory is used as major cryptographic base. Optimal key is selected based on trust value and also attack nodes are detected based on trust value to control participation in communication.

Direct-Sequence Ultrasonic Wideband Technology for Intra-Body Communications

This letter proposes a direct-sequence ultrasonic wideband (DS-UsWB) for intra-body communications (IBCs). The DS technology superimposed channel coding is proposed to enable simultaneous multi-node communications in body area networks (BANs). We simulate the channel impulse response model in a human arm by $k$ -Wave, and analyze the chip duration and pulse duration requirements to avoid an inter-symbol interference (ISI) and an inter-pulse interference (IPI) for the DS-UsWB. We then derive the closed-form formulations for data rate and bit error rate (BER) for the DS-UsWB system. Simulation results verify our theoretical analysis, and show that the proposed DS-UsWB system performance is better than the existing ultrasonic wideband (UsWB) system.

An Improved Mobility Aware Relaying Scheme for Body Area Networks

Communication in body area networks (BANs) involves weak signals, due to safety regulations, huge pathloss from the absorption and usually high mobility. In this paper, we introduce an improved mobility aware relaying scheme for BANs, as an alternative to the two-hop star topology extension of IEEE 802.15.6-2012, in order to enhance packet delivery. Specifically, an emergency phase (EP) is added after the regular random access phase (RAP1) of the superframe and the connected nodes transmit rescue beacons to reach disconnected nodes. When a disconnected node receives a rescue beacon, it participates in the current EP. The packets are buffered and relayed to the hub by the connected nodes. The simulation results show that it is feasible to receive more packets compared to the standard with a justified increase of energy consumption due to random access which is compensated with increased packet delivery.

Exploration of an Intelligent and Secure Wireless Body Area Networks for Health Monitoring

Today’s Wireless Body Area Networks technology augmented the wireless sensors communication more smart in the e-health line. With this sensors deployment prominent body parameters simply monitored remotely and the corresponding data is stored and transmitted the same for treatment purpose to the e-healthcare destination. Primarily Wireless Body Area Networks health care service is deliberately used in telemedicine, mobile health, elderly care, to monitor the chronic diseases and in emergency cases- the medical rehabilitations provided immediately without delay to the respective patient by the medical professional through internet service. As the demand of Wireless Body Area Networks e-health service increases, its ability is further enhanced once it is provided with more security and privacy to the enabled user’s data with more integrity, confidentiality, availability features. Wireless Body Area Networks makes the people to improve their quality of life provided with affordable cost and flexibility in usage having minimum operation of events. Researcher’s shows an interest over the past years in e-health care services adaptability and concerns more on real-world complications. This survey paper mainly focuses on the conceptual structure of Wireless Body Area Networks communication, security and privacy issues, and allocated frequency bands.

Delay-Dependent Priority-Aware Transmission Scheduling for E-Health Networks: A Mechanism Design Approach

In this paper, the management of medical packet transmissions in electronic health (e-health) networks is studied. Unlike most existing works in the literature, we focus on beyond wireless body area network (beyond-WBAN) communications, i.e., data transmissions from WBAN-gateways (e.g., smart phones) to the base station of medical centers, and consider a delay-dependent priority-aware transmission scheduling, which jointly takes into account both the criticality of medical packets and their starving time (i.e., experienced delays). In our model, medical packets are randomly aggregated at WBAN-gateways (each of which stands for one patient), and their beyond-WBAN transmission requests are reported to the base station with different priority information, which reflects their heterogeneities in medical importance. The base station then manages the beyond-WBAN transmissions following a constructed queueing system with a delay-dependent dynamic priority discipline. With the aim of maximizing the network welfare while preventing unexpected strategic behaviors from smart gateways, we design a truthful and efficient mechanism based on a virtual delay-dependent prioritized queueing game. Analytical and simulation results examine the feasibility of the proposed mechanism and demonstrate its superiority over the counterparts.

Flexible and Efficient Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for BANs Based on Physiological Features

In Body Area Networks (BANs), bio-sensors can collect personal health information and cooperate with each other to provide intelligent health care services for medical users. Since personal health information is highly privacy-sensitive, the flourish of BANs still faces critical security challenges, especially secure communication between bio-sensors. In this paper, we propose a flexible and efficient authenticated key agreement scheme (PBAKA) to provide secure communication for BANs. Specifically, we employ a control unit (e.g., smart phone) to launch authentication based on physiological features collected from BANs, and integrate bilinear pairings to negotiate session keys for bio-sensors. Since physiological features can be collected from various kinds of bio-sensors in real time, PBAKA is flexible for adding new bio-sensors without pre-distributed keys. Meanwhile, PBAKA is computationally efficient by offloading authentication burden from resource-limited bio-sensors to the control unit. Security analysis demonstrates that PBAKA is provably secure under the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. Extensive experimental results validate efficient communication, computation and energy consumption of our scheme when compared with several existing solutions.

A Truthful Mechanism for Scheduling Delay-Constrained Wireless Transmissions in IoT-Based Healthcare Networks

In this paper, the scheduling management of delay-constrained medical packet transmissions in Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare networks is studied. Unlike most existing works in the literature, we focus on beyond wireless body area network (beyond-WBAN) communications, i.e., data transmissions between smart WBAN-gateways (e.g., smartphones) and the base station (BS) of remote medical centers. In our model, various medical packets are randomly aggregated at each gateway (which ordinarily stands for one patient), and their delay-constrained beyond-WBAN transmission requests are immediately reported to the network controller (i.e., BS) with different priority levels reflecting their medical importance. The BS schedules the uplink beyond-WBAN transmissions by forming a queueing system which addresses specific medical-grade quality of service requirements, including the priority awareness and the delay constraints of medical packet transmissions. By taking into account the natural device intelligence of smart gateways in IoT-based networks, we design a truthful and efficient mechanism which can prevent gateways from strategically misreporting the priority levels of medical packets, while incentivizing the BS to manage the transmission scheduling according to the desired manner. Both theoretical and simulation results examine the feasibility of the proposed mechanism and demonstrate its superiority over the counterparts.

Design of New Circularly Polarized Wearable Dielectric Resonator Antenna for Off-Body Communication in WBAN Applications

A unique circularly polarized (CP) compact wearable dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) has been proposed for off-body communication in wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. The design is singly fed and a new H-shaped conformal metal strip has been used to excite the DRA. A circular polarization over a bandwidth of ~9.6% (7.47-8.25 GHz) in conjunction with an impedance matching bandwidth of ~20.7% (6.95-8.68 GHz) has been offered by the antenna. A prototype has been fabricated and measured. The antenna has been tested both in free space and on-body environment. A robust performance has been offered by the antenna against human body lossy effects. The measured results agree very well with the simulated results.

Green Communication for Wireless Body Area Networks: Energy Aware Link Efficient Routing Approach.

Recent technological advancement in wireless communication has led to the invention of wireless body area networks (WBANs), a cutting-edge technology in healthcare applications. WBANs interconnect with intelligent and miniaturized biomedical sensor nodes placed on human body to an unattended monitoring of physiological parameters of the patient. These sensors are equipped with limited resources in terms of computation, storage, and battery power. The data communication in WBANs is a resource hungry process, especially in terms of energy. One of the most significant challenges in this network is to design energy efficient next-hop node selection framework. Therefore, this paper presents a green communication framework focusing on an energy aware link efficient routing approach for WBANs (ELR-W). Firstly, a link efficiency-oriented network model is presented considering beaconing information and network initialization process. Secondly, a path cost calculation model is derived focusing on energy aware link efficiency. A complete operational framework ELR-W is developed considering energy aware next-hop link selection by utilizing the network and path cost model. The comparative performance evaluation attests the energy-oriented benefit of the proposed framework as compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. It reveals a significant enhancement in body area networking in terms of various energy-oriented metrics under medical environments.

A multi-layered dual-band on-body conformal integrated antenna for WBAN communication

This article presents a dual-band, multi-layered on-body conformal metamaterial (MTM) integrated antenna for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) communication. The frequency bands range from 3.2 GHz to 3.5 GHz and 3.9 GHz to 4.3 GHz. A zero-reflection-phase based MTM comprises of the 2 × 2 array of H-shaped unit-cell is installed beneath the monopole antenna to suppress the back radiations, and enhance the gain. The characterization of the unit-cell is done in terms of its reflection and transmission characteristics, refractive index, and material characteristics. The integration of the MTM brings down the peak 1-g-averaged SAR to 0.174 W/kg and 0.207 W/kg at the respective bands of the conformal configuration for a body-antenna separation of 1 mm. The proposed configuration proffers peak realized antenna gain of 4.54 dBi and 4.71 dBi, and Front to Back Ratio (FBR) of 11.79 dB and 12.98 dB at the respective frequency bands. The performance of the proposed antenna is rigorously analyzed against structural deformation, operating frequency, gain, and FBR. The measured performance of antenna agrees well with that of simulated results.

Channel Models for Body Surface Communications in Ultra Wideband-Based Wireless Body Area Networks

Body area networks are being developed to serve a wide range of purposes ranging from providing health care to patients on the move to tracking patients and motion sensing for gaming controls. There has been significant and sizeable amount of research in the various areas and applications of body area networks. Ultra wideband which operates in the 3.1–10.6 GHz band is slowly being preferred for high data rate communication in body area networks. The development of suitable applications and techniques for communication depends significantly on the channel models. The wireless channel is a crucial parameter as it provides significant information about the propagation characteristics and losses involved in the transmission medium. The existing channel models proposed are mostly in the spectra involving the wideband 3.1–10.6 GHz bands or the 3.1–6 GHz bands. However, the IEEE 802.15.6 specifies operation in various sub-bands of 499.2 MHz width. And the channel characteristics are significantly different for wideband and narrowband channels. In this article, we propose empirical channel models for body surface communication in the various sub-bands specified by the IEEE 802.15.6. The body surface scenario is chosen as the combination of propagation through wireless media and losses due to absorption from body tissues make it challenging. The proposed path loss models are developed from more than 300,000 received power measurements collected over a span of hours.