A Novel Intrusion Detection System for Wireless Body Area Network in Health Care Monitoring

Problem statement: Health monitoring, telemedicine, military, interactive entertainment and portable audio/video systems were most promising applications where WBANs can be used. However, designers of such systems face a number of challenging tasks, as they need to address often quite conflicting requirements for size, operating time, precision and reliability. Network security is very important in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) since the vital human life might be jeopardized, unless managed properly. Approach: This article presented security architecture of a wireless body area network for ambulatory health status monitoring. A novel Intrusion Detection System (IDS) inspired by the biological immune system that use Negative Selection Algorithm (NSA) was proposed to enhance the performance of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) to operate despite the presence of compromised (misbehaving) nodes. Results: The proposed IDS scheme had been implemented using network simulator Qualnet v5.2. The performances of IDS scheme had been analyzed using AODV, DSR and DSDV routing protocols for parameters such as average detection rate and false alarm rate. These negative selection detectors are capable of distinguishing well behaving nodes from compromised nodes with good degree of accuracy. The high false positives rate is also minimized. Conclusion/Recommendations: Wireless Body Area Networks are an enabling technology for mobile health care. The IDS can be implemented on today’s devices as it only requires minimal and low-cost hardware changes. The authors strongly believe that adding sufficient security mechanisms to WBAN will study as a trigger in the acceptance of this technology for health care purposes. Simulation results indicate the non-degradability of network performance when these IDS is incorporated in the routing algorithm for security enhancements.