A secure wireless patient monitoring system for the medical community

The area of wireless sensor networking continues to be one of the most stirring and demanding research domains of this decade. As technology progresses, so do the capabilities of wireless sensor networks: small, low-cost, wirelessly-connected embedded/pervasive computers – known as motes, capable of sensing and disseminating environmental data and related systems control. As the capabilities and application areas of this technology continue to expand, so do the associated responsibilities of the arising networks. This work focuses primarily upon the provision of security for wireless sensor network in the medical environment. Based on the research about key distribution protocols for wireless sensor networks, a software tool was developed to select such a protocol, as well as a platform, for a specific application, such the medical environment. Furthermore, there is no cluster scheme available which is reliability and energy efficient. Since 2004, there have been a number of security architectures specified for providing security to medical wireless sensor network applications, each attempting to improve upon the last. Cryptographic primitives including encryption and authentication are the principal contributors to the provision of security to wireless sensor networks. This thesis presents a software design for medical sensor networks. The literature review and evaluation of various security architectures has allowed the design of a framework that provides a set of protocols and services specifically tailored for the medical application domain. The framework provides a new energy efficient scheme which save up to 70% of the energy of a node if the node was always on. Reliability is provided by a new cluster scheme which uses the remaining energy and the link quality to the base station to select the cluster head. Furthermore, security is provided by an efficient key management scheme based on the Exclusive Based System. The implementation and testing of the framework has shown it to be an efficient, reliable and state-of-the-art security framework for wireless sensor devices in the medical community.