Privacy Preserving Medium Access Control Protocol for wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play vital role in several fields and particularly add more in the health domain. Several applications in the health domain utilize the WSNs to diagnose the disease and cure the patients. However, there is threat and risk involved for exploiting the privacy of the patient and deteriorating the performance of operating tools and systems. There are few existing approaches handling the attacks to maintain the privacy issue of wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs). Most of the threats are expected on the Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer that affect the performance of WBANs. In this paper, we introduce privacy preserving Medium Access Control (PP-MAC) to detect the selfish attack. The algorithm aims to save energy because selfish attack leads to additional energy consumption. In this type of attack, the illegitimate node has edge over the legitimate nodes at the MAC sub-layer. As a result, the illegitimate node consumes the resources negatively. The effectiveness of our proposed algorithm is tested by using OMNET++ and compared with other known existing MAC protocols designed for WBANs. Based on the simulation results, our proposed protocol performs better than other protocols in detecting the rate of selfish attacks, saving the energy, and performance throughput.