ICE++: Improving Security, QoS, and High Availability of Medical Cyber-Physical Systems through Mobile Edge Computing
Alberto Huertas Celdrán, Félix J. García Clemente, James E. Weimer, Insup Lee · 2018
The disruptive vision of Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS) enables the promising next-generation of eHealth systems that are intended to interoperate efficiently, safely, and securely. Safety-critical interconnected systems that analyze patients' vital signs gathered from medical devices, infer the state of the patient's health, and start treatments issuing information to doctors and medical actuators should improve the patients' safety in a cost-efficient fashion. Despite the benefits provided by the MCPS vision, it also opens the door to critical challenges like the security and privacy, Quality of Service (QoS), and high availability of the devices composed to support the MCPS scenario. The Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) standard is a significant step toward promoting open coordination of heterogeneous medical devices by considering the previous challenges. However, a lot of effort is still required in order to cover the whole aspects of these challenges and enable the future eHealth. In this context, we identify critical shortcomings of ICE using challenge scenarios regarding security, QoS, and high availability. According to these concerns and following the ICE standard, we propose the novel ICE++ architecture, which is oriented to the Mobile Edge Computing paradigm and combines SDN and NFV techniques to manage efficiently and automatically the MCPS elements taking into account its security, QoS, and high availability. Finally, we perform experiments that demonstrate the potential usefulness of our solution regarding the efficient and automatic management of the ICE components.