Trust based distributed group key management technique for securing multithreaded WBAN

Abstract

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are having immense application areas such as medical, battlefield, entertainment, sports, gaming and many more. Transmitting information through WBAN in a secured way has gained interest of many researchers. In this paper, we have extended the security to multithreaded environment where multiple WBANs operate together. We have proposed an optimal key selection method based on trust value for securing multithreaded wireless body area network. We have adopted prioritized routing approach where first priority is given to emergency data, next to on-demand data and last to periodic data transfer between sink node and root node. In our security proposal advanced encryption standard (AES) is combined with group key management to enforce data security. We have estimated the best optimized performance in presence of design parameters such as network topology, energy levels, source rates, received power and node count. We have implemented the security model for a fixed deployment strategy and done test runs to prove that this security solution achieves notable improvement in network throughput, packet delivery delay, packet drop ratio, detection ratio, energy consumption and network lifetime.