A Secure Transmission Protocol for Wireless
Body Sensor Networks
Guangxia Xu
School of Soft Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
Email: xugx@cqupt.edu.cn
Shuangyan Liu and Yanbing Liu
College of Communication and Information Engineering, Chongqing, China
School of Computer Science, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
Email: {liushuangyan0716 @163.com, liuyb@cqupt.edu.cn}
Abstract—A wireless body sensor network (WBSN) is a
typically wearable wireless network deployed on a user’
body, which consists of biosensors and a local personal
wireless hub, which we commonly call wireless body sensor
network controller (WBSNC). The sensitive micro data
(SMD) of WBSN users is collected by biosensors and
forwarded to the WBSNC before it is delivered to the data
process center (healthcare terminal or remote server) for
further processing. Since SMD involves user’s personal
privacy, it is important to protect secure transmission of
SMD. Therefore it is crucial to admit only legitimate
biosensors and WBSNC into the network in a WBSN.
Ensuring the safety of data transmission from each
biosensor to WBSNC or between WBSNC and the data
process center is essential because of the open feature in
wireless channel. In this paper, we present a novel kind of
cryptography and authentication method to assure a secure
network admission and transmission in a WBSN based on
ID. The procedures in this system to establish keys for each
biosensor and WBSNC must offer high communication
validity and as low energy consumption as possible. In
addition, we also propose a new way to protect BSN secure
access for biosensor and WBSNC in order to block
interference from Pseudo Node.
Index Terms—Wireless Body sensor network (WBSN), data
cryptography, network security access, WBSN
authentication, WBSN security.
I. INTRODUCTION
Recently, with the rapid development in biosensors and
wireless communication technologies (e.g., Bluetooth and
ZigBee), a wireless body sensor network (WBSN) (we
also call wireless body area networks or wireless medical
sensor networks) is developing rapidly, which can be
defined as using various wireless communication
technologies to offer pervasive monitoring of users’
sensitive micro data (SMD). A BSN is a typically
wearable wireless network deployed on a user’ body,
which consists of biosensors and a local personal wireless
hub, which we commonly call wireless body sensor
network controller (WBSNC). The sensitive micro data
(SMD) of WBSN users is collected by biosensors and
forwarded to the WBSNC before it is delivered to the
data process center (healthcare terminal or route server)
for further processing. Instead of being diagnosed face-
to-face, users’ SMD can be monitored remotely,
continuously, and in real-time, and then processed and
transferred to remote healthcare centers. Due to every
biosensor in WBSN transmits and forwards SMD via
wireless communication technology, but wireless channel
possesses the characteristics of openness, dynamic and
uncontrollability, it leads to strict insecurity problems
about data transmission. With the rapid development of
information technology, it is in badly need of solving the
problems that users’ information and location privacy in
healthcare application, if the BSN system can’t take
timely measures to meet users’ demands for data security ,
high reliable transmission and location privacy, the
development of electronic healthcare and related services
will suffer a great obstacles. For instance, an adversary
can disguise as one of the sensor nodes in WBSN and
inject error messages, launch a denial-of-service (DoS)
attack or make a replay attack, moreover, an adversary
may eavesdrop the SMD in the wireless channel from a
certain distance, so security and privacy are the most
crucial problems for data transmission in a WBSN.
Manuscript received September 30, 2013; revised January 16, 2014;
accepted January 22, 2014.
This work was supported in part by a grant from National Natural
Science Foundation(NSFC61309032), program for Innovation Team
Building at Institutions of Higher Education in ChongQing (Grant No.
KJTD201310) and The Natural Science Foundation of ChongQing
(CSTC2012jjA40053).
GuangXia Xu is with the College of Soft Engineering, ChongQing
University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
ShuangYan Liu is with the College of Communication and
Information Engineering, ChongQing University of Posts and
Telecommunications, China
YanBing Liu is with the School of Computer Science, ChongQing
University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE, VOL. 9, NO. 8, AUGUST 2014
doi:10.4304/jsw.9.8.2043-2049