SDN-Controlled Resource-Tailored Analytics for Healthcare IoT System

Abstract

In this work, we propose phSDN, a programmable healthcare network architecture for resource-tailored management and on-demand allocation of analytic modules in Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare system. The identification, dynamic management of services, and fast analysis of healthcare data are a few challenges in existing remote healthcare monitoring devices. phSDN programs and reconfigures the resources and services, while updating the associated flow-rules in the data-plane of software-defined network (SDN) architecture. It is especially useful in scenarios with intermittent or constrained network connectivity and/or device availability. The newly identified flows associated with different resources are explicitly considered, while forwarding services over the SDN network. The on-the-fly programmable services enable healthcare devices to provide resource-specific analytics. The programmability over services also allows unified control over the end-devices by reconfiguring on-the-fly vendor-specific heterogeneity of resource types. Our prototype of phSDN supports three different types of resources: 1) body temperature, 2) pulse rate, and 3) blood pressure. Experiments using our implementation show that the proposed architecture minimizes the network response time by at least 43.87% and 78.4%, compared to the fog- and cloud-based approaches, respectively. The implemented system's scalability is further evaluated using Mininet by considering latency, packet delivery ratio, and throughput, as the performance metrics.