Privacy-Preserving Protocol for Sink Node Location in Telemedicine Networks

Telemedicine is expected to play a significant role in previsioning better service and meeting various needs of patients, healthcare providers, and policy makers by exploiting advanced information and communication technologies. Because health data are highly sensitive, the security and privacy of telemedicine should be protected carefully to protect telemedicine from being potentially interrupted and attacked. In telemedicine networks, the sink node is the most vulnerable to attacks because it is where sensitive data will be collected. Thus, it is of great importance to protect the privacy of the sink node in telemedicine networks. To this end, this paper proposes an efficient privacy-preserving protocol for sink node location in telemedicine networks. Compared with the existing work, the scheme can improve the safe time of telemedicine networks by injecting request packets and reduce the delivery time by transmitting along the shortest route. In particular, the safe time can be improved by 28.57% to 52.70%, and the delivery time can be reduced by 22.86% to 27.61%.