A secure mobile healthcare system using trust-based multicast scheme

Due to the introduction of telecommunication technologies in telemedicine services, the expeditious development of wireless and mobile networks has stimulated wide applications of mobile electronic healthcare systems. However, security is an essential system requirement since many patients have privacy concerns when it comes to releasing their personal information over the open wireless channels. For this reason, this study discusses the characteristics and security issues with wireless and pervasive data communications for a ubiquitous and mobile healthcare system which consists of a number of mobile devices and sensors attached to a patient. These devices form a mobile ad hoc sensor network and collect data that are sent to a hospital or healthcare center for monitoring. Subsequently, this paper discusses the innovation and design of a novel trust evaluation model. We then propose a secure multicast strategy that employs trust in order to evaluate the behavior of each node, so that only trustworthy nodes are allowed to participate in communications, while the misbehavior of malicious nodes is effectively prevented. We analyze the security properties of our multicast scheme and evaluate its performance based on simulation experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate that our scheme not only achieves the necessary data transmission in mobile environments, but also provides more security with reasonably little additional overhead.