Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (Jun 2018)
A SECURE WIRELESS BODY AREA NETWORK FOR HEALTHCARE APPLICATIONS
Abstract
In this modern era, we use Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for monitoring parameters in numerous applications such as smart homes, agriculture field monitoring, environment monitoring, habitant monitoring, and battlefield. In various applications, health monitoring is very important and critical. In health monitoring, sensor nodes are deployed on the body of a person, and these nodes send information to the base station (BS) and from here, information is further transmitted to the distant location where the doctor looks into the report and suggest a diagnosis for the patient. In this work, a reliable, stable and throughput routing protocol is discussed, and a secure reversible data hiding method, where at the receiver end, patient information obtained from BS of WBAN can be correctly retrieved from the encrypted watermarked image is suggested. This paper also explores sensors to BS information transfer mechanism. It has been found that in case of WBAN, it is better that each sensor node directly transmits information to BS rather than using some forwarder node due to the energy loss of forwarder nodes. It has been found that using direct transfer; throughput can be increased to massive 139%. This direct transfer of the packet to BS also increases network stability and network lifetime. It is also found that in case of encryption, embedding capacity heavily depends on Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), threshold and number of embedding rounds. In case of Lena image optimum threshold is found to be 0.38, which maximizes both PSNR and bit per pixel (bpp) and error-free data is recovered.
