Design of a Blockchain based WMSN Model for Secure and Effective Health Monitoring System Deployment

Abstract

Wireless medical sensor networks (WMSN) are special types of sensor networks that are suited for medical applications. These networks must guarantee high security with low latency to store and retrieve data with high trust levels. To meet these constraints various security measures are incorporated by WMSN designers that include data encryption, hashing, steganography, etc. These models provide high security but reduce the quality of service (QoS) due to their computational complexity. Moreover, these models have limited trustability and computational performance, due to their non-tamper proof and centralized processing characteristics. To improve the security and QoS performance of WMSN deployments, this text proposes a novel blockchain-based model that is based on a novel Proof-of-Trust and Speed (PoTS) based consensus method. This is a new consensus model developed solely for the design of the proposed WMSN, which is used to monitor the health status of patients in real-time with high security. The proposed model is capable of providing high trust, complete traceability, low delay, and distributed tamper-proof transactions. The proposed model evaluates temporal node performance and selects miner nodes that have higher trust and faster speeds. Nodes that showcased lower communication delay, with minimum packet drops and lower energy consumption were selected as miner nodes. These values assisted in the evaluation of temporal trust for every WMSN communication. Due to the incorporation of temporal trust and speed values, the model can reduce the number of redundant miner selection steps, thereby assisting in the design of an improved WMSN model. The model was tested on a wide variety of network scenarios, and it was observed to be 18% faster, with 5% lower energy consumption, and 8% better throughput than state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the model was also able to mitigate Sybil, Masquerading, and Spoofing attacks, which makes it highly deployable for a wide variety of network scenarios.