Dr. Hamid Sharif from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was invited by the High Performance Network Laboratory of IACAS and he shared an academic lecture of “Security Approaches for Wireless Sensor Networks in Body Area Networks” on Jun. 25.

In Hamid’s lecture, he introduced his research work of the Body area sensor networks (BASN). BASN with miniaturized sensors are providing low-cost, convenient wireless communications capabilities for monitoring and logging vital parameters of patients suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma and heart diseases. However, numerous important research issues remain to be addressed in BASNs. Among these, communication energy efficiency and security are the most concerning issues. In the talk, Dr. Sharif discussed effective cross-layer strategies in addressing those two issues. The key idea of cross-layer communication technique is to take advantage of both source data properties and communication strategies for energy consumption optimization which can be addressed by matching the source coding of biomedical signals with the channel coding strategy.

In addressing the security issue, Professor Sharif discussed the cross-layer technique using properties of biometric data to provide effective security schemes. Specifically, two security methods of Selective Encryption and Self-Authentication approaches were discussed. Thanks to the dependency property of the compressed biomedical data, a selective encryption algorithm needs only to be applied on a very small portion of the transmitted data which can provide an uncompromised level of security. The details of these techniques had been discussed.

Biography:

Dr. Hamid Sharif is the Charles J. Vranek Distinguished Professor of the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). He is also the Director of Advanced Telecommunications Engineering Laboratory (TEL) at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Sharif is the Chair of the Graduate Committee in the Department of Computer and Electronics Engineering at UNL. He received his BSEE from University of Iowa, MSEE from University of Missouri and PhD in EE from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has over 25 years of academic and industrial experience and his research interest include wireless communication protocols, security in areas of wireless communications, security in multimedia transmissions, wireless sensor networks, and system modeling and performance evaluations.

Dr. Hamid Sharif is giving his lecture