Performance evaluation of a Fog-assisted IoT solution for e-Health applications

Abstract

Cloud Computing has been a predominant approach for the development of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. However, to meet the requirements of real-time and latency-sensitive applications in healthcare, a new computing paradigm that follows a Cloud computing approach, called Fog Computing, demonstrates to be an effective tool by extending the Cloud resources to the edge of the network. This work studies the contribution of the Fog Computing paradigm applied to healthcare, highlighting its main benefits regarding latency, network usage, and power consumption. Based on these parameters, a Fog-assisted health monitoring system is proposed and its performance evaluation and demonstration is carried out. The results demonstrates the potential enhancement of this approach to minimise data traffic in the core of the network because data is analysed locally and, also, enhancing security on health information that can be kept locally, enhancing data security and providing better insights of patient's health status.