An Improved Authentication Protocol for Wireless Body Sensor Networks Applied in Healthcare Applications

Wireless body sensor networks are now very popular for modern healthcare applications like health monitoring, remote healthcare, emergency healthcare etc. This healthcare application mainly used for constant monitoring of health specific data while doing regular activities. The wireless body area network is consisted of small wearing sensors which are implanted in human body for capturing medical data and send to a medical server through a network connector to base station. A major issue is secure transmission of patient’s medical healthcare information to the medical server through wireless communication. Also the data collected in this network is very sensitive because on the basis of this clinical data, further treatment will be occurred. Therefore, security requirements such as confidentiality, integrity, authenticity should be guaranteed during communication. This paper proposes a strong mutual authentication protocol based on public key cryptography for satisfying all security requirements. The proposed authentication approach resists the major vulnerable attacks in wireless body sensor networks with low computational and communicational load.