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FPGA based Real time secure body temperature monitoring suitable for WBSN

Conference Paper · October 2015

DOI: 10.1109/CIT/IUCC/DASC/PICOM.2015.22

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 FPGA based Real time „secure‟ body
temperature monitoring suitable for WBSN
Muzaffar Rao, Thomas Newe*, Ian Grout, Elfed Lewis, Avijit Mathur
University of Limerick, Ireland
*thomas.newe @ul.ie
Abstract— In wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs),
sensors continuously monitor human physiological activities
using medical sensors, for example; blood pressure, body
temperature and electrocardiography (ECG). A WBSN can be
used to develop a patient monitoring system. The traditional
wireless body sensor networks have limited hardware
resources in terms of computational capabilities, data
processing speed, memory and battery life. Also these WBSNs
are generally not suitable for the implementation of security
mechanisms, reason is that, implementation of security
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mechanisms require relatively more hardware resources
because of the complexity of their algorithms. To get rid of
these limitations a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
device is suitable because of its flexible architecture and high
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performance features. In this paper an FPGA based real time
‘secure’ body temperature monitoring is implemented with
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reliable data transmission, using data integrity verification.
This implementation provide framework to build a secure
FPGA based WBSN. The data integrity check is very
important for the patient monitoring systems as unreliable
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data could lead the healthcare professionals to make an
incorrect diagnosis concerning patients health. The data
integrity verification is achieved using newly selected
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cryptographic hash function called, SHA-3 (Secure Hash
Algorithm-3). To the best of authors knowledge, all previously
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published FPGA based WBSNs implementations did not
implemented any security mechanisms to secure physiological
data, so this work is the first contribution regarding it.
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Index Terms—FPGA, SHA-3, WBSNs
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays there has been increasing interest from system
designers, researchers, and application developers on a new
type of network architecture generally known as wireless
body sensor networks (WBSNs) [1]. In WBSNs, sensors
continuously monitor human‟s physiological activities and
actions, such as health status and motion patterns. A WBSN
can be used to eliminate medical errors, reduce workload
and increase the efficiency of hospital staff while improving
the comfort of patients.
A WBSN can be used to develop a patient monitoring
system (PMS) that enables monitoring of patients outside of
conventional clinical settings. A PMS allows medical
staff/physician to remotely supervise the status of its
patients, while the patients need not to be continuously
wired to the PMS for the vital parameter checkup. The need
for patient monitoring is apparent in situations where the
patient is (1) in an unstable physiological condition, for
example in the case of a drug overdose or anesthesia and (2)
in a life threatening condition, for example if there are risks
of a heart attack. An FPGA based WBSN provides flexible
The authors would like to thank the Erasmus Mundus STRoNGTiES
program and Irish Research Council (IRC) for providing funding that has
facilitated the completion of this work.
functionality with high performance features as compared to
the traditional (classical microcontroller based) WBSNs.
The FPGA devices are one of the most important
alternatives (because of its several advantages [2]) to
construct high-speed digital systems. Also, a successful
FPGA implementation can be easily transferred to a full–
custom Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) to
reduce cost for a large scale production.
Previous published work related with FPGA based
WBSNs [3][4][5] did not focused on security issues of
physiological data. To the best of authors knowledge, this is
the first work that presented FPGA based secure processing
of physiological data. A comprehensive security solution
includes privacy and data integrity verification features. The
privacy of physiological data can be achieved using any
suitable encryption algorithm like AES and to verify data
integrity, cryptographic hash functions are required. In this
work, our focus is on security feature of data integrity
verification.
In WBSNs data integrity verification is very important as
unreliable data could lead the healthcare professionals to
make an incorrect diagnosis. This can lead to, at the extreme
case, the death of a patient or at a minimum it can lead to
patient distrust in the monitoring system. Data integrity is a
term used, when referring to the accuracy and reliability of
data. It ensures that data is identically maintained during any
operation, such as transfer, storage, or retrieval of data. Any
changes to the data, for example malicious intention,
unpredicted hardware failure and human error would results
in failure of data integrity. Cryptographic hash functions are
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generally used for data integrity verification. This work uses
a recently selected cryptographic hash function called
Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3) [6], which is arguably
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the most secure algorithm to date for data integrity
verification.
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In this paper an FPGA based real time secure body
temperature implementation is proposed that can be
extended to a secure multi-sensor system using a number of
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medical sensors like blood pressure, ECG, EMG, EEG,
heart rate, respiratory rate etc. This single sensor system is
implemented with reliable data transmission using data
integrity verification. For the presented framework FPGA to
FPGA communication is considered. Although receiving
FPGA can be replac by a sink PC that can directly receive
physiological data from transmitting FPGA using any
suitable wireless technology (Bluetooth, Wifi, Zigbee etc.)
but in that case, security mechanisms will be implemented
in software running on PC. As hardware implementation of
cryptographic algorithms is more secure then software
implementation (because of the dedicated type of operation),
that‟s why in this work, FPGA to FPGA communication is
considered. A thermistor is used as a temperature sensor and
an 8-bit ADC is used for analog to digital conversion. The
FPGA reads 8-bit equivalent data of the temperature from
the ADC and applies SHA-3 to find a 256-bit hash of
temperature data. The temperature data is transmitted with
the hash using a Bluetooth link. Bluetooth technology is
selected because it is a low-cost, robust and short-range
radio link working at 2.4 GHz. The transmitted data is
received by receiving FPGA via Bluetooth link and the
receiving FPGA will calculate the hash of received data
(temperature data) to compare it with the received hash.
After comparing the calculated hash with the received hash
the receiving FPGA will display the body temperature on
PC and also on the LCD that is connected to the FPGA.
Using the same method (including encryption) a number of
medical sensors can be interface with an FPGA to build any
comprehensive secure wireless body sensor network.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. A
brief overview of the traditional body sensor networks is
given in section II, while Section III discusses FPGA based
body sensor networks. Sections IV and V cover details
about the data integrity verification and methodology.
Section VI presented the implementation results while
Section VII concludes.
II. TRADITIONAL WBSN
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The Body sensor network is an important wireless sensor
network application area and has much demand in the
medical care domain [7][8]. In traditional WBSN, sensor
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nodes, which are placed on the human body, collect physical
data and perform preliminary processing. The sensor data is
gathered by a sink node and transmitted to a base station
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using wireless technology, generally Bluetooth or Zigbee,
to share it on the internet. The basic architecture of
traditional WBSN is given in Fig.1.
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Fig. 1 Architecture of traditional WBSN
Traditional WBSNs are based on classical microcontroller
based wireless motes. The problem with these motes is
limited hardware resources in terms of computational
capabilities, data processing speeds, memory and battery
life. Also traditional body sensor networks are not suitable
for the implementation of many security features because
strong security mechanisms generally require more
hardware resources (because of the complexity of their
algorithms) than these systems can provide. To overcome
these limitations, an FPGA based WBSN is proposed. The
FPGA platform helps to get rid of these limitations because
of its flexible architecture, high performance features and
cost.
III. FPGA BASED WBSN
The FPGA based WBSN provides a platform that can be
used to get rid of traditional WBSN limitations. For high
demanding tasks FPGAs have been favoured due to the high
efficiency provided by their architectural flexibility
(parallelism, on-chip memory, etc.), reconfigurability and
excellent performance in the development of algorithms.
FPGAs don‟t have issues of memory as they have dedicated
Block RAM (BRAM) and also memory can be created by
using HDL. There are other dedicated resources of FPGAs
like dedicated hard core processors, DSP slices, Multipliers,
Multiplexers, flip flops etc. The efficient use of these
dedicated resources can result in optimised FPGA
architecture and also make FPGA devices suitable for
cryptographic algorithm implementation. Normally FPGAs
are considered to be power hungry devices but now FPGA
vendors are trying to get power optimised FPGA
architectures by introducing integrated optimised hard core
blocks. Therefore, by selecting suitable FPGAs and some
power optimisation techniques (like using embedded blocks
instead of configurable logic blocks, clock gating, increasing
the size of basic logic elements, partial reconfiguration) the
power consumption issues of FPGAs can be minimized.
The FPGA based wireless body sensor networks may
have different configurations depending upon the
application environment. The proposed experimental
framework can be used to interface body sensors with an
FPGA and the FPGA will perform all processing tasks
including security mechanisms implementations (in this
work only data integrity feature), and sends data through
Bluetooth to another FPGA that is connected to a sink PC.
The proposed FPGA based body sensor network is shown in
Fig. 2.
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Fig. 2 Proposed architecture of FPGA based WBSN
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IV. DATA INTEGRITY VERIFICATION IN WBSN USING
SHA-3
Hash functions can be used for the verification of data
integrity. This is a one-way deterministic procedure whose
input is an arbitrary block of data and whose output is a
fixed-size bit string, which is known as the hash value. The
data to be encoded is called the message, and the hash value
is called the message digest. In short, a message digest is a
fingerprint of the data and if the data changes, it changes the
fingerprint.
The hash of a piece of data is calculated and appended to
the data. When the message arrives at its destination (in the
case of data transfer) or is retrieved (in the case of data
storage), the hash is recalculated from the data and
compared it to the hash, that was appended to the original
message. If the values do not match, then it means the data
has been corrupted and will not be processed.
 Previously used hash functions (SHA-0, SHA-1, SHA-2,
RIPEMD and MD5) were found to have Vulnerabilities
[9][10][11]. Although, no attack on SHA-2 has been
reported yet, but the algorithmic similarity of SHA-2 with
SHA-1, make this algorithm‟s security susceptible. That‟s
why we implemented newly selected cryptographic hash
function SHA-3, to provide data integrity verification. This
new algorithm was announced by National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST), USA in 2012 [12]. Our
earlier presented implementation technique [13] is used for
SHA-3 implementation, to provide data integrity verification
of temperature sensor‟s data.
V. METHODOLOGY
A. FPGA based sensor node
The FPGA based sensor node in WBSNs generally
comprises of six parts as shown in Fig. 3. The medical
sensors (body temperature, blood pressure, ECG etc.) are the
key components of BSNs, as they bridge the physical world
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1) Data processing in Tx. FPGA:
The Tx FPGA receives each bit of data from the ADC on
each rising edge of the system clock signal. So, eight clock
cycles are required to receive a complete set of temperature
data and a temporary register is used in the FPGA to store
this data. This cycle of 8 clocks repeats continuously to
detect any change in digital output and updates temporary
registers accordingly. To verify data integrity, the SHA-3 is
implemented as a function to provide a 256-bit hash of the
received temperature data. The 256-bit hash data is
concatenated with the 8-bit temperature data and these bits
are transmitted using the Bluetooth module. Also this
transmitted data is displayed on LCD to have the idea about
the current status of temperature. For serial data
transmission/reception a UART function is implemented in
HDL. The sequence of data processing in the Tx. FPGA is
shown in Fig. 5.

and electronic systems and are used for collecting the vital
signals related with health of a patient. Sensors are
interfaced with an anti-alias filter that is used before the
signal sampler, to restrict the bandwidth of a signal. This
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anti-alias filter attenuates the higher frequencies, and

prevents the aliasing components from being sampled. The
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ADC takes the analogue signal from the filter and sends its
Fig. 4 (a) Transmitting System
digital equivalent to the FPGA. The FPGA takes the digital
data and performs any additional processing required to
secure it before sending the data to the sink device/PC via
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the wireless module. The power supply block is used to

fulfil power requirement of all components on the sensor
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node. The next section describes the implementation of one Fig. 4 (b) Receiving system
of the vital parameters of patient monitoring system in
WBSN i.e. real time body temperature monitoring.
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Fig. 3 FPGA based sensor node

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B. Real time body temperature monitoring

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There are two main parts of the implemented design as

shown in Fig. 4(a) and (b), the transmitting and receiving
systems. The transmitting system is further divided into
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body temperature sensor, A/D converter, transmitting FPGA

(Tx FPGA) and Bluetooth module, while the receiving
system consists of Bluetooth module, receiving FPGA (Rx
FPGA) and software running on PC/Laptop.
The transmitting and receiving systems communicate via
a Bluetooth link. The transmitting FPGA takes temperature
data from the analogue to digital converter and calculates
the hash of this data by applying the cryptographic hash
function (SHA-3) and then transmits the 256-bit hash with
the temperature data via Bluetooth. The receiving FPGA
separates the temperature data and received hash and
recalculates the hash of this data by applying SHA-3
function. Then calculated hash is compared with the
received hash for data integrity verification. After
confirmation about data integrity, the receiving FPGA sends
the temperature data to the sink PC for processing, as well
as to a LCD display that is connected with FPGA for
temperature monitoring.
Fig. 5 Data processing in Tx. FPGA
2) Data processing in Rx. FPGA:
The transmitted data is received by Rx FPGA through the
Bluetooth module using UART function that is implemented
using HDL inside the FPGA. The received temperature data
is separated from 256-bit hash and again SHA-3 is
implemented to re-calculate hash for data integrity
verification. The received hash is compared with the
calculated hash and if both hash are equal then temperature
data is transmitted to PC/Laptop using UART and also to
the LCD connected with FPGA. The software running on
the PC detects the temperature and displays the respective
temperature accordingly. Any change in temperature is
detected by software and temperature display is updated. TABLE I IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS ON XILINX FPGAS
Since, Rx FPGA is directly attached with PC through serial
wired connection, it is assumed that this connection is Device Slices Frequency Static Power
secure and there is no need for further data integrity (MHz) Consumption
verification at the sink PC again. The operating sequence of (mW)
Rx FPGA is given in Fig. 6. Artix 7 970 152.67 41
Spartan 3AN 3,235 81.22 41
Spartan 6 1,058 116.80 67
Virtex 6 1,056 158.90 1,977
Kintex 7 1,041 246.66 74

VII. CONCLUSION
This work investigated a framework that is suitable for
secure FPGA based WBSNs implementation. To the best of
authors knowledge, previously published work of FPGA
based WBSNs did not implemented security mechanisms to
secure physiological data. So, this work is the first
contribution regarding it. This work used real time body
temperature measurement with data integrity verification, to
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provide experimental framework for FPGA based WBSN.

Using the same method discussed here for a temperature
sensor, any number of medical sensors can be interfaced
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with the FPGA to build a complex body sensor network.

Pu

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8th International Conference on Sensing Technology (ICST 2014),
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