A Study of IEEE 802.15.4 Security Framework for Wireless Body Area Network

A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a collection of low-power and lightweight wireless sensor nodes that are used to monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. It supports a number of innovative and interesting applications, including ubiquitous healthcare and Consumer Electronics (CE) applications. Since WBAN nodes are used to collect sensitive (life-critical) information and may operate in hostile environments, they require strict security mechanisms to prevent malicious interaction with the system. In this paper, we first highlight major security requirements and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in WBAN at Physical, Medium Access Control (MAC), Network, and Transport layers. Then we discuss the IEEE 802.15.4 security framework and identify the security vulnerabilities and major attacks in the context of WBAN. Different types of attacks on the Contention Access Period (CAP) and Contention Free Period (CFP) parts of the superframe are analyzed and discussed. It is observed that a smart attacker can successfully corrupt an increasing number of GTS slots in the CFP period and can considerably affect the Quality of Service (QoS) in WBAN (since most of the data is carried in CFP period). As we increase the number of smart attackers the corrupted GTS slots are eventually increased, which prevents the legitimate nodes to utilize the bandwidth efficiently. This means that the direct adaptation of IEEE 802.15.4 security framework for WBAN is not totally secure for certain WBAN applications. New solutions are required to integrate high level security in WBAN.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

Partition-Based GTS Adjustment for Wireless Sensor Networks

The personal area network (PAN) coordinator can assign a guaranteed time slot (GTS) to allocate a particular duration for requested devices in IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode. The main challenge in the GTS mechanism is how to let the PAN coordinator allocate time slot duration for the devices which request a GTS. If the allocated devices use the GTS partially or the traffic pattern is not suitable, wasted bandwidth will increase, which degrades the performance of the network. In order to overcome the abovementioned problem, this paper proposes the Partitioned GTS Allocation Scheme (PEGAS) for IEEE 802.15.4 networks. PEGAS aims to decide the precise moment for the starting time, the end, and the length of the GTS allocation for requested devices taking into account the values of the superframe order, superframe duration, data packet length, and arrival data packet rate. Our simulation results showed that the proposed mechanism outperforms the IEEE 802.15.4 standard in terms of the total number of transmitted packets, throughput, energy efficiency, latency, bandwidth utilization, and contention access period (CAP) length ratio

Efficient GTS Allocation Schemes for IEEE 802.15.4

IEEE 802.15.4 is a standard defined for wireless sensor network applications with limited power and relaxed throughput needs. The devices transmit data during two periods: Contention Access Period (CAP) by accessing the channel using CSMA/CA and Contention Free Period (CFP), which consists of Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS) allocated to individual devices by the network coordinator. The GTS is used by devices for cyclic data transmission and the coordinator can allocate GTS to a maximum of only seven devices. In this work, we have proposed two algorithms for an efficient GTS allocation. The first algorithm is focused on improving the bandwidth utilization of devices, while the second algorithm uses traffic arrival information of devices to allow sharing of GTS slots between more than seven devices. The proposed schemes were tested through simulations and the results show that the new GTS allocation schemes perform better than the original IEEE 802.15.4 standard

QoS Supportive MAC Protocols for WSNs: Review and Evaluation

The use of wireless sensor networks technology is growing in different applications of monitoring. Since it is a relatively new technology, the interest of researchers to improve the network performance and behaviour has been enormous. In this context, new resource allocation scheme that takes into account traffic priority and load has been introduced. The evaluation of this scheme is intended to be achieved by implementing a custom simulator. This report discusses and evaluates all the important concerns needed to be considered during the development of this project. Moreover, this work also reviews the related literature in order to afford optimisations to the scheme

Study of MAC Protocols for Mobile Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) also referred to as a body sensor network (BSN), is a wireless network of wearable computing devices. It has emerged as a key technology to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and diagnose many life threatening diseases. WBAN operates in close vicinity to, on, or inside a human body and supports a variety of medical and non-medical applications. The design of a medium access control is a challenge due to the characteristics of wireless channel and the need to fulfill both requirements of mobility support and energy efficiency.  This paper presents a comparative study of IEEE 802.15.6, IEEE 804.15.4 and T-MAC in order to analyze the performance of each standard in terms of delay, throughput and energy consumption. Keywords: Biomedical, IEEE 802.15.6; T-MAC, IEEE 802.15.4, mobility, low-power communication, wireless body sensor networks, implantable sensors, healthcare applications, biosensors