Enhancing Security and Efficiency in Healthcare Fog Computing Through Multi-Criteria Application Placement and Blockchain-Based Smart Contract

In recent times, many doctors have turned to telemedicine to monitor their patients remotely, especially since the COVID-19 epidemic. This approach has been particularly valuable for patients with chronic illnesses who require regular monitoring, as well as for those living in remote areas or having difficulty traveling. To achieve this, it is necessary for patients to provide their physiological data to doctors. Ensuring the secure sharing of this data, preventing any unauthorized alterations, and safeguarding patient privacy require robust access control. Fog computing (FC) serves as the best support for implementing a real-time IoT (Internet of Things)- integrated healthcare system, such as telemedicine. FC efficiently addresses major cloud difficulties and offers numerous benefits over cloud computing (CC), such as lower latency, distributed computation, and storage situated close to end users. However, it also introduces new difficulties, such as the challenge of application placement, which must consider factors like resource constraints and security. This article concentrates on the placement of access control applications in telemedicine systems and fog cloud environments. Our approach uses FC to establish the distributed infrastructure necessary for remote patient health monitoring. We propose an access control application placement policy that leverages multicriteria decision-making and Blockchain (BC) smart contracts to deliver dynamic, optimized, and self-adjusting access control.