Secure and Efficient Routing towards Quality of Service and Bandwidth Optimization for Wearable Body Area Networks

Abstract

Healthcare industry plays crucial role in the wellbeing of people across the world. With technological innovations in terms of sensing and remote patient monitoring using Internet of Things (IoT) there is greater promise from the industry to people. Wearable devices with sensing capabilities are emerged to automate the collection of vital signs of patients. It has led to sensor networks known as Wearable Body Area Networks (WBANs). The sensors associated with a human being form a WBAN and many such networks are interconnected to form a to topology that wireless WBANs to get integrated with wired networks and cloud computing through Internet and gateways. As WBANs produce large volumes of data continuously, the networks are integrated with cloud computing where on-demand, scalable and available resources are available for storage and analytics of healthcare data. With the realization of this kind of e-Health architecture, there is ongoing research on remote patient monitoring where data collected by sensors ultimately reach cloud. In such WBANs topology there is need for secure and efficient routing towards Quality of Service (QoS) and bandwidth optimization. In the existing systems, there were issues like delay and security issues. In this paper we integrate the WBANs topology with fog computing and cloud computing for effectiveness in QoS and bandwidth optimization. Two algorithms are proposed to achieve dynamic channel assignment and integration with fog gateway for leveraging QoS in routing. The proposed model along with its algorithms is simulated using NS-2 under different conditions such as mobility, possible attacks, fog density and interference. The experimental results revealed that the proposed solution achieves significant improvements in resiliency and efficiency of WBANs based healthcare system.