Communication Jamming in Body Sensor Network: A Review

The Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) surrounds and communicates with the human body. Wearable and implantable tiny sized sensor nodes placed or attached on the human body collect the physiological data to achieve the continuous monitoring of patient’s health conditions. These sensor nodes depend on open wireless medium for effective transmission of vital and confidential information. For the purpose of overcoming the interference problem, spread spectrum modulation methods such as Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) and Frequency Hop Spread Spectrum (FHSS) have become widely used. If you use a typical spread spectrum modulation approach in the face of a reactive jammer, it is required for the transmitter and receivers to communicate pseudo-noise (PN) codes as a secret key for data transfer. Furthermore, if a jammer is aware of the Pseudo-Noise codes, it is capable of replicating the same secret Pseudo-Noise codes and so jamming the entire system. Therefore, strict security mechanisms are essential to enable a secure WBSN from various vulnerable attacks such as reactive jammer and eavesdropper. This paper reviews diverse relevant works associated with anti-jamming in wireless communication.