A Sensor Cloud for the Provision of Secure and QoS-Aware Healthcare Services

Abstract

Nowadays, the integration of wireless sensor networks (WSN) with cloud computing is of great interest to healthcare research and industry. In this context, the design and development of sensor clouds enables the integration of several WSNs to improve the reliability, extensibility and availability of these networks. It also enhances the development of large-scale healthcare services and decouples the physical part, which contains wireless sensors, from the logical part providing services to end users. This paper proposes a novel sensor cloud architecture to monitor high-risk patients anytime and anywhere. On top of the physical sensors, we build virtual sensors with respect to the medical staff’s requests. These virtual entities are dynamically created and updated based on the patient’s location and health status, and the occurrence of sensitive events related to the status of the assigned physical sensors. Moreover, the configuration of virtual sensors is enriched with new functions of monitoring, maintenance, security and power saving to make their utilization efficient. New authentication protocols are also proposed to anonymously authenticate high-risk patients and provide evidence regarding the real involvement of wireless sensors in data collection. The proposed architecture enables the medical staff to benefit from new medical services and improves the quality of life of high-risk patients by ensuring a continuous monitoring of their medical state anywhere and anytime. A simulation is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed healthcare architecture.