SmartHealth-NDNoT: Named Data Network of Things for Healthcare Services

Abstract

In recent years, healthcare sector has emerged as a major application area of Internet-of-Things (IoT). IoT aims to automate healthcare services through remote monitoring of patients using several vital sign sensors. Remotely collected patient records are then conveyed to the hospital servers through the user's smartphones. Healthcare IoT can thus reduce a lot of overhead while allowing people to access healthcare services all the time and everywhere. However, healthcare IoT exchanges data over the IP-centric Internet which has vulnerabilities related to security, privacy, and mobility. Those features are added to the Internet as external add-ons. In order to solve this problem, in this paper, we propose to use Named Data Networking (NDN), which is a future Internet paradigm based on Content-Centric Networking (CCN). NDN has in-built support for user mobility which is well-suited for mobile patients and caregivers. NDN also ensures data security instead of channel security earlier provided by the Internet. In this paper, we have developed NDNoT, which is an IoT solution for smart mobile healthcare using NDN. Our proof-of-concept prototype shows the usability of our proposed architecture.