ABSTRACT

Technological innovation and miniaturization trends have paved the way for sensor nodes to be placed on, around or inside the human body to monitor different biological aspects through Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). Nodes in a WBAN monitor, process and communicate data among themselves or to the sink node in a wireless mode. The transmission of sensitive data over the wireless medium requires reliable and secure communication so that the data can be kept safe from malicious nodes. However, reliable and secure data transmission in WBANs is a challenging task. The conventional biometric-based cryptographic algorithms are not suitable for secure data routing in WBANs due to their complexity, resource consumption and incapability to counter the node-misbehavior attacks. On the other hands, trust-based routing schemes have proved to be light-weight schemes that require less number of resources in providing secure and reliable communication to deal with the node-misbehavior attacks. Moreover, wireless communication among WBAN nodes produce electromagnetic radiation which result in temperature rise that could be harmful to sensitive tissues, particularly around the implanted nodes. Therefore, secure and temperature-aware routing protocols are of prime importance for WBANs. However, most of the existing temperature-aware routing protocols are developed with the aim to reduce temperature-rise, whilst overlooking other critical factors such as energy, security, reliability and QoS. This negatively affects network lifetime, transmission delays and network throughput, in this thesis, we propose a novel protocol with QoS provisioning for WBANs referred to as Trust, Energy and Temperature-aware Routing protocol (TETRP). This multi-facet routing protocol routes data packets through efficient links having highly trusted, energy-efficient and hotspot-free nodes. The simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme improves throughput by 33%, end-to-end delay by 36%, network lifetime by 32%, packet delivery ratio by 24%, temperature reduction by 10% and routing overhead reduction by as compared to the state-of-the-art routing schemes.