STHChain: A Scalable IoT-Fog-Blockchain Architecture with Lightweight Consensus for Secure Tourist Healthcare

Tourists’ healthcare maintenance, especially during the outbreak of infectious diseases, is a major challenge in the tourism industry. Ensuring accurate tourists’ healthcare data requires data collected using Internet of Things (IoT) devices within a smart city. Additionally, data integrity is preserved through storage on a blockchain platform to maintain reliability. Some works have addressed blockchain-based healthcare solutions for smart tourists, nevertheless many aspects require further investigation. Therefore, we propose a lightweight and scalable blockchain-based smart tourists healthcare model, called STHChain to present welfare services. The model first configures a hierarchical network of IoT devices, edge, and fog computing layers to collect, preprocess, and store tourists’ healthcare data. Subsequently, a smart contract defines formal Role-Based Access Control mechanisms for the model’s components, including sensor devices, edge nodes, fog nodes, hotels/hostels, welfare centers, and tourists. This contract also executes a deterministic function to classify tourists' health status based on sensor data, which governs their access to welfare service. Finally, healthcare data are included in blocks and verified using a proposed Raft-based Clustering consensus protocol called RaC to add the chain of blocks. The energy consumption and throughput of the model is evaluated using iFogSim simulator, demonstrating that it is energy-efficient, scalable and suitable for real-time tourist healthcare monitoring.

کلیدواژه ها:

Blockchain ، Healthcare ، Internet of Things ، IoT ، Smart city ، Smart Tourist ، Tourism ، Welfare Services