Energy-Efficient Blockchain-Based Secure Model to Share Medical Data Using Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Blockchain technology is gaining importance in different sectors like healthcare, finance, agriculture, and many more. The important capabilities of blockchain like decentralization, immutability, consensus mechanism, etc. provide security, privacy, transparency, accountability, and many other benefits. On the other hand, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a distributed framework that provides cloud computing capabilities to mobile devices. The existing studies combining blockchain technology and MEC often do not consider the delay and energy consumption for data offloading. In this paper, a blockchain-based scheme has been proposed for sharing Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) data between a patient and a doctor, which offloads tasks to the MEC server to achieve energy efficiency. In the proposed scheme, the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) protocol is used to share a channel among several users. Here, NOMA offers some advantages in the system like low cost, latency, and power consumption. In the proposed scheme, the energy consumption is optimized based on the task delegation decision and resource distribution in the MEC server. Additionally, operations of the blockchain network are automated using various smart contracts. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is analyzed in terms of energy consumption, average transmission rate, and offloading delay in processing healthcare data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model enhances energy efficiency and optimizes performance compared to the state-of-the-art offloading schemes.