Trust Aware Routing Protocols in Wireless Body Area Networks

The technology made it easier to design the sensors of small size such that human can easily wear/implant them on his body and free to do his regular activities without any interruption. These tiny sensors can monitor, track and record the physical and environmental changes occurred in the surrounding. It is preferred to deploy the sensors where the regular continuous interference of human is very difficult. For a quality life, healthcare is the main concern today. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) can play an important role in improving the quality of life. The main contribution of this paper is to review the trust-aware routing protocols which are able to detect the malicious nodes during communication by using node's trust factor as important metric to make the node to node communication secure. In this paper, we also present an overview of the WAN, its architecture, communication technologies used, various routing parameters, applications, security issues, and challenges. We further give a brief discussion about the flaws in the existing trust-aware routing protocols of WBAN.