Secure medical image transmission system for remote IoHT applications over 5G network

With an increasingly aging population prone to chronic conditions, coupled with an insufficient number of healthcare professionals, further aggravated by the shortage of medical facilities, telemedicine in general and telecare in particular have become unavoidable. However, a major challenge when dealing with remote healthcare is securing patient medical information. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a system for the secure transmission of patient information through Internet of Health Things (IoHT). The data are first encrypted by a proposed algorithm and then transmitted using both the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and the M-Phase Shift Keying (M-PSK where M can be B, Q, 16 or 256) as a modulation technique at the network level through an Additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel in a 5G environment network. The encryption proposed here uses a two-dimensional Sine-Arcsine-Cos-Arcsine (2D-SACA) chaotic model and a sequence generator based on 512 SHA model to secure a patient’s medical images. The internal loop of the cryptosystem is a permutation-substitution cell. The proposed cryptosystem offers a versatile range of technical solutions and strategies that are adaptable to various scenarios. The evaluation metrics, with approximate average values of 99.71% for Number of Pixels Change Rate (NPCR), 33.57% for Unified Average Changed Intensity (UACI), and 7.97 for information entropy, closely align with the desired ideal outcomes. The image transmission quality was also evaluated using Average Phase Error (APE), Bit-Error-Rate (BER), data loss, and percent error of pixels of the received image, at different Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) values. The Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values at different SNR (at 0, 5, and 10 dB) values of a secure OFDM system are respectively 8.6932, 14.1673 and 36.8018, which proves that our our proposed scheme has a good noise robustness. The 2D-SACA model demonstrates strong real-time performance and scalability for edge-based encryption in 5G environments, maintaining sub-20 ms latency and > 99% throughput efficiency under realistic conditions.