IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Lightweight Security and Provenance for Internet of Health Things

As an extension of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) plays an important role in the remote exchange of data of different physical processes such as patient monitoring, treatment progress, observation, and consultation. In IoHT, connectivity, integration, computation, and interoperability are enabled through various sensors, actuators, and controllers, thereby providing seamless connectivity with efficient utilization of resources. With advances in telemedicine, telesurgery, and other healthcare applications, streaming has become an essential part of IoHT. The data traffic in IoHT applications, such as interactive multimedia streaming, real-time image processing, traffic generated from faulty sensors and vital signs, can tolerate packet loss but has stringent delay requirements. On the other hand, video streaming applications cannot tolerate jitter. Similarly, the low-power devices are sensitive to packet loss and the periodic physiological traffic of medical traffic can tolerate delay or jitter, but not packet loss. Routing data in different IoHT applications has varying quality-of-service (QoS) requirements in terms of delay, packet loss, jitter, and throughput.