BEdgeHealth: A Decentralized Architecture for Edge-based IoMT Networks Using Blockchain

TL;DR

BEdgeHealth is a decentralized architecture combining MEC and blockchain to improve healthcare data sharing, privacy, and security in distributed hospital networks, demonstrated through real-world experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized health architecture integrating MEC and blockchain with data offloading, sharing, and smart contract-based authentication.

Findings

Improved QoS in healthcare data management.

Enhanced data privacy and security guarantees.

Effective decentralized user access verification.

Abstract

The healthcare industry has witnessed significant transformations in e-health services by using mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain to facilitate healthcare operations. Many MEC-blockchain-based schemes have been proposed, but some critical technical challenges still remain, such as low quality of services (QoS), data privacy and system security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized health architecture, called BEdgeHealth that integrates MEC and blockchain for data offloading and data sharing in distributed hospital networks. First, a data offloading scheme is proposed where mobile devices can offload health data to a nearby MEC server for efficient computation with privacy awareness. Moreover, we design a data sharing scheme which enables data exchanges among healthcare users by leveraging blockchain and interplanetary file system. Particularly, a smart contract-based authentication mechanism is integrated with MEC to perform decentralized user access verification at the network edge without requiring any central authority. The real-world experiment results and evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BEdgeHealth architecture in terms of improved QoS with data privacy and security guarantees, compared to the existing schemes.