Cost-Effective and Anonymous Access Control for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are expected to play an important role in monitoring the health information and creating a smart, reliable, and ubiquitous healthcare system. Only authorized users can access the network since the collected data by the WBANs are used to diagnosed and treated. However, it is still a challenging task to design a cost-effective and secure access control scheme because of inherent characteristics of the WBANs, such as open medium channel, limited resources of sensor nodes, and the absence of fixed infrastructure. In this paper, we first propose a novel certificateless signcryption scheme, and then, design a cost-effective and anonymous access control scheme for the WBANs using the novel signcryption. The proposed access control scheme achieves anonymity, confidentiality, authentication, integrity, and nonrepudiation. Compared with existing three access control schemes for the WBANs, our proposed scheme has the least computational cost and total energy consumption for the controller.