• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.453-462
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• 2015

Body area networks (BANs) have emerged as an enabling technique for e-healthcare systems, which can be used to continuously and remotely monitor patients' health. In BANs, the data of a patient's vital body functions and movements can be collected by small wearable or implantable sensors and sent using shortrange wireless communication techniques. Due to the shared wireless medium between the sensors in BANs, it may be possible to have malicious attacks on e-healthcare systems. The security and privacy issues of BANs are becoming more and more important. To provide secure and correct association of a group of sensors with a patient and satisfy the requirements of data confidentiality and integrity in BANs, we propose a novel enhanced secure sensor association and key management protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography and hash chains. The authentication procedure and group key generation are very simple and efficient. Therefore, our protocol can be easily implemented in the power and resource constrained sensor nodes in BANs. From a comparison of results, furthermore, we can conclude that the proposed protocol dramatically reduces the computation and communication cost for the authentication and key derivation compared with previous protocols. We believe that our protocol is attractive in the application of BANs.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.313-316
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• 2014

Energy consumption is an important issue in body area networks (BANs). In this letter, we propose an energy efficient transmission power control scheme for IEEE 802.15.6 BANs, which can improve energy efficiency by adaptively adjusting the transmit power in an on-demand way to adapt to varying channel environments. Simulations are performed to evaluate the performance, and it is shown that the proposed power control scheme outperforms traditional ones in terms of energy efficiency without significant reliability degradation.