RECCE: A reliable and efficient cloud cooperation scheme in E-healthcare

E-healthcare is an emerging and promising healthcare system to meet the increasing medical demand from aging population. It requires extensive data storage, pervasive data access, and reliable computing resources to support the real-time communication of critical health information and the real-time diagnosis. Recently, cloud computing, including public cloud and private cloud, with both scalability and accessibility is proposed to be integrated in the e-healthcare system. However, in meeting stringent medical requirements, private clouds lack necessary reliability, whereas public clouds suffer from communication delay. In this paper, we first introduce a cooperation framework to address the distinct challenger facing different clouds. It is inspired by the fact that private clouds are geographically deployed and public clouds can be regarded to possess infinite computing resources. In our framework, private clouds are designed to serve parts of local requests to public clouds, and rewarded by receiving help with excess requests. We adopt stochastic control theory to address the failure minimization issues for private clouds under random demand process. We prove the optimality of a policy constructed through recursion. Numerical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate that our proposed scheme can improve the reliability of private clouds, as well as reduce average delay of public clouds.