TIHCS: Trust-Based Improved QoS for Health Care Systems in Smart Cities

Healthcare management is a major application of future Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart cities. The healthcare applications rely on the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which consist of sensor networks with diverse communication infrastructure. This makes it more vulnerable and increases the malicious attacks resulting in compromised Quality of Service (QoS) and anomalies in data transmission resulting in transmission delay of the legitimate nodes in the network. This may cause life threats in the healthcare system as critically ill patients’ data needs to be delivered to the centralized healthcare centre of the smart cities. In this work, a Trust-based Improved QoS for Health Care System (TIHCS) is proposed. TIHCS offers a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based slots allocation mechanism for legitimate nodes by introducing a malicious detection mechanism. In addition, it proposes a mechanism based on the Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRS) to restrict the communication of the specific area where a malicious node is present and allow legitimate nodes of the affected area through relay node selection by proposing a Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The simulation results show that TOPSIS-based relay selection in TIHCS offers a better secrecy sum rate as compared to the other three methods. Furthermore, the proposed trust-supported TDMA-based Media Access Control (MAC) protocol offers improved data transmission of the most sensitive data traffic, by allowing more highly sensitive data nodes to transmit their data as compared to the well-established standards such as First Come First Serve, Round Robin, Shortest Job First, and Longest Job First.