B2H: Enabling delay-tolerant blockchain network in healthcare for Society 5.0

Abstract

This paper introduces an architecture – B2H – to enable a delay-tolerant public blockchain network (PBCN) in healthcare systems for Society 5.0. Healthcare systems in Society 5.0 envision an abstract paradigm that provides beyond health monitoring services to all the citizens of the society. These services include healthcare medical supply chain, clinical trial, and hospital management. To provide these services, the existing healthcare systems upload their important information, such as users’ health parameters, medicinal details, and clinical trial information into the cloud using PBCN (Ioppolo et al., 2020). Additionally, PBCN provides end-to-end security in uploading of such healthcare information in healthcare systems by decentralizing and distributing the information validation among multiple end-user devices. The existing PBCN-based healthcare systems enable its users to validate information before the transaction of healthcare information. Enabling such a facility in the healthcare systems of Society 5.0 increases the validation latency of PBCN in healthcare systems, considering the presence of a huge number of citizens in Society 5.0. On the other hand, the existing PBCN-based healthcare systems are unable to detect malicious end-users, which may degrade the efficiency of the healthcare systems of Society 5.0. We introduce B2H to address the issues of increasing validation latency and detecting malicious end-users in the healthcare systems of Society 5.0. The architecture of B2H utilizes the features of PBCN. B2H introduce a layer of validation service providers (VSPs) in a PBCN that collects information from the end-user, distributes it among multiple validation devices. VSP in B2H reduces the validation time by distributing the information among a specific set of validation devices (VDs). B2H also allows the end-user to optimally select a VSP and a VSP to select a set of validation devices optimally. Through extensive experiments, we observe that B2H performs better than the existing schemes by reducing 94%–95% average network delay, 88%–94% average energy consumption, and 94%–96% average cost.