Healthcare Center IoT Edge Gateway Based on Containerized Microservices

Abstract

The growth of ubiquitous healthcare systems, particularly for general and residential healthcare, is increasing dramatically. One of the most significant components of such systems is the gateway, which acts as a middleware between Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud application services. Here, we propose an IoT edge gateway framework based on docker container technology as the legacy virtualization technology to empower microservice architectures for aiding multiple-device real-time monitoring in locations such as nursing homes and residential care centers. The framework is used to identify IoT devices and the gateway itself in home networks for restricting access only to authorized users and non-manipulated devices. We propose the use of state-of-the-art hardware-based security supporting the mutual authentication process with the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm as well as integrity protection to validate the device, gateway, and cloud platform integrity to identify manipulation and detect unauthorized changes by signing these data. This approach can prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. As a result, we can implement each service located in this proposed IoT edge gateway framework to enhance capabilities in edge analytics by adding hardened security with the average latency time at 2.373 ms.