Design and Verification of an NDN-Based Safety-Critical Application: A Case Study with Smart Healthcare

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging networking paradigm where smart devices generate, aggregate, and seamlessly exchange data over the predominantly wireless medium. The Internet, so far, has played a significant role in connecting the world, but still, IoT-based solutions are suffering from two primary challenges: 1) how to secure the sensors data and 2) how to provide efficient local and global communication among various heterogeneous devices. Recently, named data networking (NDN), a future Internet paradigm is proposed to improve and simplify such IoT communication issues. NDN allowed users to fetch data by names irrespective of the actual hosting entity connected through a host-specific IP address. NDN well suits the content-centric pattern of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications predominantly used in IoT. In this paper, we leverage the basic feats of NDN architecture for designing and verification of an NDN-based smart health IoT (NHealthIoT) system. NHealthIoT uses pure-NDN-based M2M communication for capturing and transmission of raw sensor data to the home server which can detect emergency healthcare events using Hidden Markov Model. Emergency events are notified to the cloud server using a novel context-aware adaptive forwarding (Cdf) strategy. Post emergency notifications, and user health information is periodically pulled by the cloud server and by other interested parties using NDN-based publish/subscribe paradigm. The cloud server carries out long-term decision making using probabilistic modeling for detecting the possibility of chronic diseases at the early stage. We extend the workflows intuitive formal approach model for verifying the correctness of NHealthIoT during the emergency. We evaluate the cdf strategy using ndnSIM. Moreover, to validate and to show the usability of NHealthIoT, we develop a proof-of-concept prototype testbed and evaluate it extensively. We also identify some research challenges of the NDN-IoT for researchers.