Analyses of key management techniques for secure patient monitoring in wireless sensor network environment

Abstract

With an upward trend of population growth, especially elderly people and in view of expenditure budgets and limited staff, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) bring a number of significant improvements to healthcare application. Each patient carries her own body lightweight sensors which measure the values of different health parameters and send them to the healthcare database. WSNs are vulnerable due to their specific nature. Furthermore, measured data forms a crucial part of personal health information and the patient must consent to the treatment and must be informed of any access to her record. Then, they must be adequately protected before being stored in the patient medical record. To achieve security in wireless sensor networks, it is important to be able to encrypt messages sent among sensor nodes. Due to small memory capacity, constrained power supply, limited computational capability and communications bandwidth of WSNs, such key management in wireless sensor networks is hard to achieve. This project has identified the most suitable key management technique among the popular techniques available to secure data in consideration of the application requirements and the WSN constraints. To achieve this objective, some common key management techniques were implemented, simulated and compared based on their energy cost and communication complexity and suggest best techniques to healthcare application. Simulation shows that hybrid technique is the best key management technique to secure patient monitoring in Wireless Sensor Network environment.