A Secure Blockchain-Enabled SDN-Based Edge Computing Framework for IoT Healthcare Systems

Abstract

: Healthcare systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) are widely used in patient monitoring, telemedicine, emergency care, and hospital-at-home services. However, existing IoT healthcare networks still face major challenges related to security, trust management, network control, and real-time emergency data handling. Centralized trust mechanisms and repeated cloud-based verification may increase delay and reduce reliability in critical healthcare scenarios. Moreover, suspicious medical devices must be quickly isolated, while sensitive patient data and emergency traffic must be protected and prioritized. To address these issues, this work proposes a blockchain-enabled, software-defined networking (SDN)-based edge computing framework for IoT healthcare systems. The proposed architecture integrates blockchain for secure and distributed trust management, edge computing for low-latency processing, and an Open Network Operating System (ONOS)-based SDN control plane for emergency-aware flow management, dynamic traffic engineering, and policy-based medical traffic segmentation. The framework is evaluated against a recent blockchain-edge-cloud-SDN IoT baseline. The results show that the proposed framework reduces average jitter by 15.05% , energy consumption by 6.10% , and delay by 14.16% , while improving packet delivery ratio by 6.85% and throughput by 9.85% . These results indicate that the proposed approach can provide more reliable, efficient, and secure communication for connected hospitals, intensive care unit (ICU) monitoring