Energy cost analyses of key management techniques for secure patient monitoring in WSN

Since the sensors collect personal medical data, security and privacy are important factors in wireless sensor networks. Due to small memory capacity, constrained power supply, limited computational capability and communications bandwidth of WSNs, applying key management in wireless sensor networks is hard to achieve. Energy is a central concern in the deployment of cryptographic techniques in WSNs. This paper has identified the most suitable key management technique among the popular techniques available to secure data in consideration of the application requirements and the WSN constraints. To achieve this objective, some common key management techniques are implemented, simulated and compared based on their energy cost and then best techniques for healthcare application will be suggested. Simulation results show that hybrid technique consumes the lowest amount of energy among the others for secure patient monitoring in wireless sensor network environment.