Security considerations for wireless carrier agonistic bio-monitoring systems

Advances in information and communications technology has led to a significant advances in noncontact portable devices capable of monitoring vital signals of patients. These wearable and implantable bio-monitoring systems allow collections of wearable sensors to be constructed as a Body Area Network (BAN) to record biological data for a subject. Such systems can be used to improve the quality of life and treatment outcomes for patients. One of the main uses for a bio-monitoring system is to record biological data values from a subject and provide them to a doctor or other medical professional. However, wearable bio-monitoring systems raise unique security considerations. In this paper, we discuss some of the security considerations that have arisen in our work around communications agnostic bio-monitoring, and how we have addressed these concerns. Furthermore, the issues related to the identifying and trusting sender and receiver entities are discussed.

Software-defined carrier wireless networks

The telecommunication industry is entering a new era. The increased traffic demands imposed by the huge number of always-on connections require a quantum leap in the field of enabling techniques. Furthermore, subscribers expect ever increasing quality of experience with its joys and wonders, while network operators and service providers aim for cost-efficient networks. These requirements require a revolutionary change in the telecommunications industry, as shown by the success of virtualization in the IT industry, which is now driving the deployment and expansion of cloud computing. Telecommunications providers are currently rethinking their network architecture from one consisting of a multitude of black boxes with specialized network hardware and software to a new architecture consisting of “white box” hardware running a multitude of specialized network software. This network software may be data plane software providing network functions virtualization (NVF) or control plane software providing centralized network management — software defined networking (SDN). It is expected that these architectural changes will permeate networks as wide ranging in size as the Internet core networks, to metro networks, to enterprise networks and as wide ranging in functionality as converged packet-optical networks, to wireless core networks, to wireless radio access networks.