Energy Efficient Security Architecture for Wireless BioMedical Sensor Networks

Abstract: Latest developments in VLSI, wireless communications, and biomedical sensing devices allow very small, lightweight, low power, intelligent sensing devices called biosensors. A set of these devices can be integrated into a Wireless Biomedical Sensor Network (WBSN), a new breakthrough technology used in telemedicine for monitoring the physiological condition of an individual. The biosensor nodes in WBSN has got resource limitations in terms of battery lifetime, CPU processing capability, and memory capacity. Replacement or recharging of batteries on thousands of biosensor nodes is quiet difficult or too costly. So, a key challenge in wireless biomedical sensor networks is the reduction of energy and memory consumption. Considering, the sensitivity of information in WBSN, we must provide security and patient privacy, as it is an important issue in the design of such systems. Hence this paper proposes an energy efficient security protocol for WBSN where security is provided to the physiological data, which is being transmitted from the sensor node to the sink device. This is achieved by authenticating the data using patients biometric, encrypting the data using Quasi Group cryptography after compressing the image data using an energy efficient number theory based technique.