A Critical Analysis of Healthcare Applications Over Fog Computing Infrastructures

Over the last decade, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices has grown exponentially. In order to support the computational demand of real-time latency-sensitive applications in healthcare, a new paradigm named Fog Computing has emerged. Fog Computing is located closer to the IoT devices/sensors and is considered to be an extension of the Cloud Computing. In this paper, a hospital ward room is used as a case study, where the scenario is simulated using the iFogSim simulator, in order to evaluate and analyse its behaviour in terms of latency, network usage, cost of transmission, and power consumption. The results point out the possibility to enhance Quality of Service for patients and care givers by adding the Fog Computing layer to the current Cloud infrastructure.