Hybrid Congestion Control Mechanism as a Secured Communication Technology for the Internet of Health Things

Abstract

The Internet of Health Things (IoHT) has been proposed as an extended version of the Internet of Things (IoT) focusing on making the medical field intelligent by providing smart health services and sharing health data remotely in a secured way without data loss. However, IoHT uses the current internet architecture to transmit healthcare data, which highlights the limitations of this architecture due to the heterogeneity of IoHT devices and the volume and size of data exchanged. Named Data Networking (NDN) has emerged as a potential internet architecture for IoHT because of its characteristics that make it the optimal solution for IoHT. In addition, health data is transferred frequently in IoHT, which increases the possibility of congestion and therefore packet loss. To address this issue, we propose to use EC-Elastic, an NDN congestion control mechanism to control congestion in IoHT. EC-Elastic aims to maximize the use of available bandwidth, ensure data transmission with reasonable delay and minimize packet loss, which is highly required in IoHT systems. EC-Elastic has been implemented in ndnSIM and compared against PCON. The simulation results show that EC-Elastic can effectively improve the throughput compared to PCON with a reasonable delay while maintaining a low packet loss rate.