Edge-enabled Secure Healthcare System

In edge computing, edge nodes are hierarchically arranged, while data transmission is allowed among edge nodes. Because end devices are the closest to raw data sources, they usually submit requests with sensitive information to the edge nodes. Privacy issues occur during the transmission process. In addition, when an end user sends a request to edge nodes, the end user connects to the closest edge node initially, and the request is passed to the upper-layer edge nodes for further processing when the resources of the initial nodes are exhausted. The resource limitation includes computation, storage capabilities, and the number of users. For example, if a user generates one request to the connected edge node exceeding its computation power, the upper-layer edge node will be involved in the operation. Additionally, the information will be transmitted to the other edge nodes, which might be malicious. Thus, privacy preservation is necessary to prevent privacy leakage from data transition among multiple edge nodes in hierarchical structures.

The ever-increasing scale and more stringent latency requirements of mobile computing tasks have driven the recent development of distributed edge computing. In distributed edge computing, a large-scale computing task is partitioned into multiple small subtasks and executed in parallel on multiple edge nodes (ENs) to reduce computation delay. In early works of this area, the computation results of the subtasks are often transmitted back in a non-cooperative manner, which may lead to suboptimal downlink communication delay. Replicated edge computing can alleviate this issue by replicating the computing task over multiple ENs to enable cooperative transmission in the downlink. However, this will inevitably entail multi-fold increase of computation costs. To bridge the gap between the conventional distributed edge computing and the replicated edge computing, a novel partial replication based distributed edge computing scheme is proposed in this work. In particular, by judiciously determining the portion of task to be replicated at the ENs, the proposed scheme can harvest cooperative transmission gains while avoiding excessive computational replication costs. Accordingly, a partial replication based delay minimization problem is formulated. By leveraging the generic alternating optimization framework, this problem can be divided into two subproblems of power allocation and task partitioning. Through analysis, a semi-closed form solution is derived for the former non-convex subproblem, while the latter subproblem turns out to be linear. Simulation results are presented to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Wearable devices are a fast-growing technology with impact on personal healthcare for both society and economy. Due to the widespread of sensors in pervasive and distributed networks, power consumption, processing speed, and system adaptation are vital in future smart wearable devices. The visioning and forecasting of how to bring computation to the edge in smart sensors have already begun, with an aspiration to provide adaptive extreme edge computing. Here, we provide a holistic view of hardware and theoretical solutions toward smart wearable devices that can provide guidance to research in this pervasive computing era. We propose various solutions for biologically plausible models for continual learning in neuromorphic computing technologies for wearable sensors. To envision this concept, we provide a systematic outline in which prospective low power and low latency scenarios of wearable sensors in neuromorphic platforms are expected. We successively describe vital potential landscapes of neuromorphic processors exploiting complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) and emerging memory technologies (e.g., memristive devices). Furthermore, we evaluate the requirements for edge computing within wearable devices in terms of footprint, power consumption, latency, and data size. We additionally investigate the challenges beyond neuromorphic computing hardware, algorithms and devices that could impede enhancement of adaptive edge computing in smart wearable devices.

PurposeArtificial Intelligence (AI) has surpassed expectations in opening up different possibilities for machines from different walks of life. Cloud service providers are pushing. Edge computing reduces latency, improving availability and saving bandwidth.Design/methodology/approachThe exponential growth in tensor processing unit (TPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) combined with different types of sensors has enabled the pairing of medical technology with deep learning in providing the best patient care. A significant role of pushing and pulling data from the cloud, big data comes into play as velocity, veracity and volume of data with IoT assisting doctors in predicting the abnormalities and providing customized treatment based on the patient electronic health record (EHR).FindingsThe primary focus of edge computing is decentralizing and bringing intelligent IoT devices to provide real-time computing at the point of presence (PoP). The impact of the PoP in healthcare gains importance as wearable devices and mobile apps are entrusted with real-time monitoring and diagnosis of patients. The impact edge computing of the PoP in healthcare gains significance as wearable devices and mobile apps are entrusted with real-time monitoring and diagnosis of patients.Originality/valueThe utility value of sensors data improves through the Laplacian mechanism of preserved PII response to each query from the ODL. The scalability is at 50% with respect to the sensitivity and preservation of the PII values in the local ODL.

The health monitoring component is the essential block, a pillar of several e-health systems. Plenty of health tracking applications and specific technologies such as smart devices, wearables, and data management systems are available. To be effective, promptly reacting to issues, a health monitoring service must ensure short delays in data sensing, collection, and processing activities. This is an open problem that distributed computing paradigms, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud, and Edge computing, could address. The solution proposed in this paper is based on Stack4Things, an IoT-Cloud framework to manage edge nodes such as mobiles, smart objects, network devices, workstations, as a whole, a computing infrastructure allowing to provide resources on-demand, as services, to end users. Through Stack4Things facilities, the health tracking system can locate the closer computing resource to offload processing and thus reducing latency per the Edge computing paradigm.

One of the most important issue that must be addressed in designing communication protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSN) is how to save sensor node energy while meeting the needs of applications. Recent researches have led to new protocols specifically designed for sensor networks where energy awareness is an essential consideration. Internet of Things (IoT) is an innovative ICT paradigm where a number of intelligent devices connected to Internet are involved in sharing information and making collaborative decision. Integration of sensing and actuation systems, connected to the Internet, means integration of all forms of energy consuming devices such as power outlets, bulbs, air conditioner, etc. Sometimes the system can communicate with the utility supply company and this led to achieve a balance between power generation and energy usage or in general is likely to optimize energy consumption as a whole. In this paper some emerging trends and challenges are identified to enable energy-efficient communications in Internet of Things architectures and between smart devices. The way devices communicate is analyzed in order to reduce energy consumption and prolong system lifetime. Devices equipped with WiFi and RF interfaces are analyzed under different scenarios by setting different communication parameters, such as data size, in order to evaluate the best device configuration and the longest lifetime of devices.

As high quality real-time service demands on smart device applications are rapidly increasing, offloading the application task to the edge server to reduce total response time is emerging as a key issue. Meanwhile, smart devices are very sensitive to the energy consumption (to maximize the battery lifetime), where various energy consumption schemes have been attempted to minimize the power profile, especially for computationally heavy tasks. In this paper, an energy consumption minimization scheme that adjusts both the offloading ratio and CPU operating frequency of the device based on a Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique under delay constraint is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme minimizes the energy consumption of the device while satisfying the delay requirement.

With the rapid development of the mobile Internet, smart devices are playing an increasingly important role in people's lives. Edge computing is a key technology for solving resource scheduling problems and is of great significance for meeting high-performance user requirements. This paper deeply studies the resource scheduling strategy for Internet of Things edge computing based on artificial potential field algorithm. It analyzes the architecture of edge computing, resource scheduling methods, research problems, and technical methods, and discusses its application scenarios and challenges. Through the introduction of artificial potential field algorithm, the edge computing resource scheduling is optimized to improve system performance and user experience.

Edge computing is a novel network architecture that is in proximity to the end devices in an Internet of Things (IoT). As the IoT becoming a major factor in our daily life, provisioning a low response time of the services to IoT users through edge computing is an important problem. Caching necessary program data for the task in an edge node effectively reduces the response time of the computation task. However, due to the increase of IoT users and devices, it is noteworthy that limited-resource edge nodes would receive a number of tasks, having a heavy burden of processing the requests. Therefore, the limited resource and caching space at cloudlet need the careful design of the caching algorithm to utilize the space of multiple edge nodes and relieve the burden of computations. In this paper, we propose a cooperative program caching system that makes different edge nodes cooperatively store program data and cache the replicas of the data requested frequently to handle a number of requests from IoT users. In particular, we develop a cooperative caching algorithm that caches the appropriate number of data replicas depending on the number of requests on each cloudlet and the popularity of the data to minimize the response time. The simulation results show that the proposed cooperative caching algorithm can effectively reduce the response time for IoT users compared to other existing algorithms.

With the proliferation of ubiquitous Internet of things (IoT) sensors and smart devices in a wide array of industries, involving transportation, agriculture, and healthcare, a huge amount of data is being generated, which requires ever-increasing calculations and services both at the cloud and at the edge of the network. Because cloud servers are specifically located a significant distance from IoT devices, time-sensitive Internet of things applications must be extended to the cloud architecture for the timely delivery of important services. Although IoT services can be allocated to the right edge nodes, ensuring low latency and efficient resource use is still challenging. To overcome these challenges, a novel resource allocation using clustering enabled optimization in IoT (RACE-IoT) has been proposed in this paper. This work introduces a novel Shannon–dragonfly (Sha-Dragon) optimization algorithm, which combines the dragonfly algorithm with the Shannon entropy for resource scheduling. The proposed RACE-IoT balances the load by reallocating the resources to maintain the same load ratio over all servers. The developed technique has been compared with the previous strategies involving PBSM, HRL-Edge-Cloud, and ERAM-EE in terms of specific parameters such as energy consumption, throughput, response time, end-to-end delay, resource utilization, makespan, and success rate. The outcomes demonstrate the efficiency of the developed RACE-IoT technique. The proposed technique achieves higher success rates of 35%, 17%, and 18% than existing techniques such as PBSM, HRL-Edge-Cloud, and ERAM-EE, respectively.

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a common serious genetic disease, which has a severe impact due to red blood cell (RBCs) abnormality. According to the World Health Organisation, 7 million newborn babies each year suffer either from the congenital anomaly or from an inherited disease, primarily from thalassemia and sickle cell disease. In the case of SCD, recent research has shown the beneficial effects of a drug called hydroxyurea/hydroxycarbamide in modifying the disease phenotype. The clinical management of this disease-modifying therapy is difficult and time consuming for clinical staff. This includes finding an optimal classifier that can help to solve the issues with missing values, multi-class datasets, and features selection. For the classification and discriminant analysis of SCD datasets, 7 classifiers based on machine learning models are selected representing linear and non-linear methods. After running these classifiers with a single model, the results revealed that a single classifier has provided us with effective outcomes in terms of the classification performance evaluation metric. In order to produce such an optimal outcome, this research proposed and designed combined classifiers (ensemble classifiers) among the neural network’s models, the random forest classifier, and the K-nearest neighbour classifier. In this aspect, combining the levenberg-marquardt algorithm, the voted perceptron classifier, the radial basis neural classifier, and random forest classifier obtain the highest rate of performance and accuracy. This ensemble classifier receives better results during the training set and testing set process. Recent technology advances based on smart devices have improved the medical facilities and become increasingly popular in association with real-time health monitoring and remote/personal health-care. The web-based system developed under the supervision of the haematology specialist at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in order to produce such an effective and useful system for both patients and clinicians. To sum up, the simulation experiment concludes that using machine learning and the web-based system platforms represents an alternative procedure that could assist healthcare professionals, particularly for the specialist nurse and junior doctor to improve the quality of care with sickle cell disorder.

Recent advances in machine learning and deep learning have enabled many existing applications in smart cities, autonomous systems, and wearable devices. These applications often demand scalable real-time cognitive intelligence and on-the-spot decision making. Current computer systems have been customized for a cloud computing paradigm which often does not meet latency constraints and scalability requirements. To address the limitations of the cloud computing paradigm, the general trend is toward shifting the computation next to data producers at the edge. However, the edge computing paradigm is in the very early stages. Many system-level aspects of edge computing, including algorithms mapping and partitioning across edge computing resources (edge server, and edge nodes) are unknown. New research is required to understand and quantify design dimensions for edge computing.This paper presents a novel edge computing infrastructure for distributed real-time video analytics. This paper presents a holistic solution for co-designing application and edge infrastructure, including edge nodes and edge servers, to enable scalable real-time Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Deep Learning (DL) video analytics across many cameras. For experimental results and evaluation, we focus on the case study of object re-identification across many cameras, which is composed of object detection/classification (TinyYOLOv3), feature extraction, local re-identification, and global re-identification kernels. We evaluate the edge system under three different task mapping and resource allocation configurations. The results present that with the edge nodes (video cameras) more than 32, the only scalable solution is to perform detection/classification (TinyYOLOv3), feature extraction, local re-identification on the edge nodes next to cameras, and execute global re-identification on edge server.

In recent years, the upward trend in adolescent obesity rates has become increasingly evident. The emergence of smart wearable devices has broken through the traditional technical barriers of sweat detection, enabling real-time, non-invasive, and continuous monitoring of athletic performance in adolescents. This report aims to explore the impact of smart wearable devices on enhancing the athletic performance of adolescents from the perspective of sweat analysis. Method: We employed various research methods, including literature review, logical analysis, and statistical analysis, to conduct a comprehensive search for relevant literature from the past five years in electronic databases such as PubMed, Web of Science, and CNKI. This review summarizes the latest research advancements in the field of athletic performance monitoring based on sweat analysis and the application of smart wearable devices (1). The electrolytes found in sweat can be utilized to assess the body’s hydration status and muscle fatigue levels. Detection of metabolites such as glucose and lactate can indicate physical fitness status and anaerobic metabolism levels. Furthermore, cortisol can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of fat loss in adolescents. (2) Screen printing technology allows for the integration of multiple electrochemical sensors onto a single flexible substrate, enabling non-invasive detection of sweat biomarkers through methods such as colorimetric analysis and electrochemical analysis using various sensitive elements. Microfluidic systems serve as the core technology, facilitating the absorption and accumulation of sweat, thus enhancing detection efficiency. (3) Smart wearable devices based on sweat analysis can assess various indicators, including activity intensity, energy expenditure, hydration status, and thermoregulation abilities of obese adolescents during exercise. Additionally, employing big data analytics, these devices can provide personalized exercise prescriptions tailored to the specific needs of adolescents. Smart wearable devices based on sweat detection hold great potential for a wide range of applications. However, several issues persist in their current practical use. For example, the rapid evaporation of sweat can lead to detection results that are easily influenced by environmental factors and temperature. Additionally, the sensitivity of smart sensors may decrease after repeated use. Therefore, it is essential to strengthen the interdisciplinary integration of fields such as electrochemistry, materials science, and exercise science. This collaboration can enrich the practical application scenarios of smart wearable devices and optimize the pathways for monitoring athletic performance.

It is very important for the safe operation of the power grid to be able to achieve real-time online monitoring, but along with the expansion of the smart grid, powerful computing power is required to achieve online monitoring, which cannot be loaded by ordinary servers. Due to the limited computing and storage resources of the server, it is difficult to fully meet the real-time requirements of online power line monitoring. Therefore, this research proposes a smart grid real-time monitoring and early warning system based on edge computing, which can reasonably allocate computing tasks according to the effective use of edge node resources. It can also collect and process information in real time, and can monitor the power grid online, which improves the fault identification efficiency of the power grid, effectively reduces the economic cost, and relieves the computing pressure of the online monitoring equipment on the cloud computing server. Meanwhile, considering the burst problem in allocation queue optimization, a multipriority allocation queue algorithm is proposed, and an improved greedy algorithm allocation model is used to solve the optimal scheduling problem between bursts. Simulation analysis shows that the scheduling scheme proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the monitoring delay of the power line monitoring system, improve the overall adaptability and compatibility of the system, meet the market demand, and facilitate promotion.

This thesis focuses on how to optimize the placement of the Edge Computing infrastructure for upcoming 5G networks. To this aim, the core contributions of this research are twofold: 1) a novel heuristic called Hybrid Simulated Annealing to tackle the NP-hard nature of the problem and, 2) a framework called EdgeON providing a practical tool for real-life deployment optimization. In more detail, Edge Computing has grown into a key solution to 5G latency, reliability and scalability requirements. By bringing computing, storage and networking resources to the edge of the network, delay-sensitive applications, location-aware systems and upcoming real-time services leverage the benefits of a reduced physical and logical path between the end-user and the data or service host. Nevertheless, the edge node placement problem raises critical concerns regarding deployment and operational expenditures (i.e., mainly due to the number of nodes to be deployed), current backhaul network capabilities and non-technical placement limitations. Common approaches to the placement of edge nodes are based on: Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), where the processing capabilities are deployed at the Radio Access Network nodes and Facility Location Problem variations, where a simplistic cost function is used to determine where to optimally place the infrastructure. However, these methods typically lack the flexibility to be used for edge node placement under the strict technical requirements identified for 5G networks. They fail to place resources at the network edge for 5G ultra-dense networking environments in a network-aware manner. This doctoral thesis focuses on rigorously defining the Edge Node Placement Problem (ENPP) for 5G use cases and proposes a novel framework called EdgeON aiming at reducing the overall expenses when deploying and operating an Edge Computing network, taking into account the usage and characteristics of the in-place backhaul network and the strict requirements of a 5G-EC ecosystem. The developed framework implements several placement and optimization strategies thoroughly assessing its suitability to solve the network-aware ENPP. The core of the framework is an in-house developed heuristic called Hybrid Simulated Annealing (HSA), seeking to address the high complexity of the ENPP while avoiding the non-convergent behavior of other traditional heuristics (i.e., when applied to similar problems). The findings of this work validate our approach to solve the network-aware ENPP, the effectiveness of the heuristic proposed and the overall applicability of EdgeON. Thorough performance evaluations were conducted on the core placement solutions implemented revealing the superiority of HSA when compared to widely used heuristics and common edge placement approaches (i.e., a MEC-based strategy). Furthermore, the practicality of EdgeON was tested through two main case studies placing services and virtual network functions over the previously optimally placed edge nodes. Overall, our proposal is an easy-to-use, effective and fully extensible tool that can be used by operators seeking to optimize the placement of computing, storage and networking infrastructure at the users’ vicinity. Therefore, our main contributions not only set strong foundations towards a cost-effective deployment and operation of an Edge Computing network, but directly impact the feasibility of upcoming 5G services/use cases and the extensive existing research regarding the placement of services and even network service chains at the edge.