Trust management in opportunistic pervasive healthcare systems

Trust management has become a cornerstone for information security and privacy, to enable secure data sharing in pervasive healthcare systems. This paper proposes the use of the opportunistic networks (oppnets) paradigm as a solution for communication and data dissemination in such environment. Oppnet allows communication among nodes by opportunistically connecting devices without relying on any pre-existing routing paths. Based on this feature, we argue that our recently proposed trust management scheme for pervasive computing can be used in wireless network-based pervasive healthcare environments to efficiently detect malicious devices in addition to providing trust between devices, and to adequately exploit the recommendations from trustworthy devices. Using a distributed in-home pervasive healthcare application scenario, simulation experiments are conducted to assess the achievement of the stated goals.