A MIMO-OFDM based secure and robust communication system for IOT driven healthcare

Abstract

E-health is a comprehensive term applied for the joint utilization of communication technologies with electronic information for health sector. Internet of Things (IoT) in conjunction with Cyber Physical systems (CPS) is an emerging paradigm that is supposed to hugely influence e-health services round the globe. One of the core issues that need to be addressed in an IoT driven e-healthcare system is the security and robust transmission of Electronic Health Record (EHR) in a fading channel environment. For reliable and high speed transmission of critical electronic information, we have exploited Multiple Input Multiple Output, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing MIMO-OFDM technology. This paper presents a secure and robust technique for transmission of medical images with EHR hidden in them for an IoT driven e-health setup. The Orthogonal Variable Spreading Factor (OVSF) codes have been put to use for robustness enhancement of critical medical information during its transmission. In order to upturn the reliability of the transmission link and hence the robustness of the developed system, the antenna diversity order has been exploited. To ensure security of EHR, information hiding has been used to embed EHR in cover medical images prior to its transmission. Spatial domain embedding techniques, Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Intermediate Significant Bit (ISB) substitution, due to their lesser computational complexity have been used for Electronic Patient Record (EPR) embedding. The proposed scheme has been evaluated in terms of various image quality indices. The results obtained show that the proposed scheme is capable of transmitting EPR securely and robustly. A comparison of the proposed scheme with some state of art techniques shows that our system performs better in a real fading environment.