Performance Analysis And A Proposed Improvement For The IEEE802.15.6

Recently, with the rapid development in wearable medical sensors and wirelesscommunication technology, wireless body area networks (WBAN) have emerged as apromising technique that will revolutionize the way of healthcare. Instead of beingmeasured face-to-face, with WBAN patients’ health-related parameters can bemonitored remotely, continuously, and in real time, and then processed and transferredto medical databases. In this way, healthcare processes, such as clinical diagnosis andemergency medical response, will be facilitated and expedited, thereby greatly increasethe efficiency of healthcare.IEEE802established a Task Group called IEEE802.15.6for the standardizationof WBAN. It defines Physical Layer (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layersfor WBAN，also with a security diagram to ensure security communication. The designof security mechanism of WBAN faced with the contradiction between safety andefficiency. On the one hand, since the patient-related data stored in the WBAN plays acritical role in medical diagnosis and treatment, it is essential to ensure the security ofthese data. Failure to obtain authentic and correct medical data will possibly prevent apatient from being treated effectively, or even lead to wrong treatments. On the otherhand, Wearable sensors are often extremely small and have insufficient power supplies,which render them inferior in computation and storage capabilities, but the charge orchange of the body sensors are not appropriate, especially for embedded ones. Thus,the cryptographic primitives used by the sensor nodes should be as lightweight aspossible, in terms of both fast computation and low storage overhead.This paper briefly overview the PHY and MAC layers specifications. Thencarefully analysis the security paradigm of the standard and simulate it with OpnetModeler simulation tool. Then, this paper puts forward a biological-based securityassociation scheme. In this scheme, the node and hub use the biology information torealize mutual authentication and security association, with the benefit of assisting inreducing the frame transmission, energy consume and time required. Then wesimulate the two schemes and compare their energy consumes, and it proves that thenew scheme is more energy-efficient.