PHDA: A priority based health data aggregation with privacy preservation for cloud assisted WBANs

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), as a promising health-care system, can timely monitor human physiological parameters. Due to the limitation of communications, power, storage and computation in WBANs, a cloud assisted WBAN flourishes and provides more reliable, real-time, and intelligent health-care services for patients and mobile users. However, it is still critical to efficiently aggregate the different types of WBAN data to the cloud server. In addition, security and privacy concerns are also of paramount importance during the communications between WBAN and cloud. In this paper, we propose a priority based health data aggregation (PHDA) scheme with privacy preservation for cloud assisted WBANs to improve the aggregation efficiency among different types of health data. Specifically, we first explore social spots to help forward health data and enable users to select the optimal relay according to their social ties. According to different data priorities, the adjustable forwarding strategies can be selected to forward the user's health data to the cloud servers with the reasonable communication overheads. The security analysis demonstrates that the PHDA can achieve identity and data privacy preservation, and resist the forgery attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation shows that the PHDA achieves the desirable delivery ratio with reasonable communication costs and lower delay for the data in different priorities.