Performance Issues in a Secure Health Monitoring Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) had been traditionally used in various applications involving remote monitoring. More recently WSNs were applied to the telemedicine area such as healthcare monitoring of elderly patients requiring constant supervision that may or may not be mobile patients. Many efforts have been made to enhance performance of wireless sensors / implantable body sensors in terms of decreasing cost, size etc. However very little effort has been done to provide security and patient privacy when dealing with WSNs. Healthcare monitoring systems are traditionally complex systems involving not only data collection using WSN but also data propagation to healthcare provider, large databases and complex expert and knowledge based systems, therefore security and patient privacy is a very sensitive and important issue in design of such systems. In this paper discuss the security requirements for a health monitoring system, propose a security mechanism and investigate the performance aspects of our proposed solution.