Smart Contract-Based Access Control Scheme for Blockchain Assisted 6G-Enabled IoT-Based Big Data Driven Healthcare Cyber Physical Systems

6G (sixth-generation wireless), the successor to 5G cellular technology, operates at higher frequencies than its predecessor and supports significantly greater capacity and markedly reduced latency. Healthcare is treated as a complex system with various stakeholders, like doctors, patients, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies as well as healthcare decision-makers. The innovations in the Internet of Things (IoT) and incorporating emerging technology in the healthcare systems provide the quality of services to the people and save millions of lives. However, patient privacy and secure interchange of medical data from various healthcare providers need to be adequately addressed. Furthermore, incorporating blockchain in the healthcare system helps to make the system more transparent and secure due to inherent properties of the blockchain. In addition, Big Data analytics helps in analyzing large datasets from hundreds of patients, and then in identifying various clusters and correlation among datasets, and also in developing predictive models. In this paper, we aim to propose a new smart contract-based access control for 6G-enabled blockchain assisted in the healthcare system (in short, we call it as SACS). SACS provides a patient to communicate with its healthcare management authority securely and helps to interchange his/her medical information across healthcare providers. A detailed security analysis, experimental results and comparative study assure that the proposed SACS is secure by preventing possible active and passive attacks, andrequires less computational and communication costs as compared to those for other relevant competing schemes.

I. Introduction

The evolution of emerging technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) based healthcare system have the potential to play an essential role in providing smart and high-quality healthcare ecosystems to humanity [1]. The advancement of technologies in healthcare system pushes the people to get benefited with quality healthcare by obtaining e-health services instead of conventional healthcare systems. To achieve superior healthcare services, “information and communication technologies (ICTs)” [2] help to provide efficient and cost effective transmission of electronic health records (EHRs). The EHR contains the patient’s medical history, diagnoses results (i.e., digital X-ray, electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)), and other treatments. Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is extensively used and integrated in IoT-based healthcare systems in order to access the sensitive data, which provides accurate health information to the patients and the authorized doctors [3]. Due to increasing demand for IoT-based healthcare systems, a huge volume of EHR data is generated and processed on a regular basis. Such a system is referred as Healthcare-based CPS (HCPS) [4].