Secure lightweight routing (SLR) strategy for wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are becoming a popular choice for a wide range of monitoring applications such as healthcare, sport activity and rehabilitation systems. However, lack of security in WBANs may hamper the wide public acceptance of this technology. Open nature of the wireless medium, makes the patients' data prone to eavesdropping, modification, or loss. Few existing WBAN routing protocols can be found on providing secure authentication using encryption mechanisms, however they do not consider lightweight communication approach. In this paper we propose an energy efficient mechanism that prevents malicious intruders from dropping data packets or forwarding fake data. The mechanism is applied to Adhoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol though it can work with any other reactive WBAN routing protocol. The protocol is simulated and results show its effectiveness in detecting malicious nodes with low overhead.