An Efficient Policy System for Body Sensor Networks

Body sensor networks (BSNs) have become a promising technology for healthcare, in which biosensors continuously monitor physiological parameters of a user. Distinct from conventional sensor networks for environmental monitoring, such networks need to be adaptive and can therefore be easily managed. In addition, security becomes a necessity. To this end, we design a policy system that implements policy-driven management on the sensor level. Biosensor adaptability is realized through support of dynamic loading, enabling and disabling of policies without shutting down nodes. In addition, fine-grained access control becomes possible through authorization policies on biosensors. Design and implementation details of the policy system are presented. Experimental results demonstrate that the policy system is viable and can accelerate application development of biosensor networks for healthcare.