Challenges and Developments in Secure Routing Protocols for Healthcare in WBAN: A Comparative Analysis

The rise in life expectancy of humans, COVID-19 pandemic and growing cost of medical services has brought up huge challenges for the government and healthcare industry. Due to unhealthy lifestyle, there is an increased need for continual health monitoring and diagnosis of diseases. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is attracted attention of researchers as various biosensors can be embedded in or worn on the body of human beings for the measurement of health parameters. The patient’s health data is then sent wirelessly to the physician for health analysis. The biosensors used to measure physiological parameters have limited power due to its small size and hence smaller form factor. For the longevity of the network, it is imperative to transmit the data in an energy-efficient manner. Moreover, the health information of the patient is stringently private. Hence, the privacy and security of transmitted information needs to be ensured. It necessitates the development of effective, lightweight and secure routing protocols that provides security with minimal use of resources. This paper has identified the numerous security requirements in WBANs and has provided the extensive review on existing secure routing protocols reported in the literature. A comparative analysis of the various existing state-of-the art secure routing protocols and critical analysis based on security techniques along with different performance parameters has been presented.