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Open Access

ARTICLE

A Secure Blockchain-Enabled SDN-Based Edge Computing Framework for IoT Healthcare Systems

Vikas Tyagi1,*, Mrinmoy Kayal1, Arvind Prasad2,*, Gauhar Ali3, Sajid Shah3, Muhammad Asim3
1 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Galgotias University, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
2 Information Systems and Security, College of IT, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates
3 EIAS Data Science and Blockchain Lab, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
* Corresponding Author: Vikas Tyagi. Email: email; Arvind Prasad. Email: email

Computers, Materials & Continua https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.085763

Received 18 May 2026; Accepted 29 June 2026; Published online 19 August 2026

Abstract

Healthcare systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) are widely used in patient monitoring, telemedicine, emergency care, and hospital-at-home services. However, existing IoT healthcare networks still face major challenges related to security, trust management, network control, and real-time emergency data handling. Centralized trust mechanisms and repeated cloud-based verification may increase delay and reduce reliability in critical healthcare scenarios. Moreover, suspicious medical devices must be quickly isolated, while sensitive patient data and emergency traffic must be protected and prioritized. To address these issues, this work proposes a blockchain-enabled, software-defined networking (SDN)-based edge computing framework for IoT healthcare systems. The proposed architecture integrates blockchain for secure and distributed trust management, edge computing for low-latency processing, and an Open Network Operating System (ONOS)-based SDN control plane for emergency-aware flow management, dynamic traffic engineering, and policy-based medical traffic segmentation. The framework is evaluated against a recent blockchain-edge-cloud-SDN IoT baseline. The results show that the proposed framework reduces average jitter by 15.05%, energy consumption by 6.10%, and delay by 14.16%, while improving packet delivery ratio by 6.85% and throughput by 9.85%. These results indicate that the proposed approach can provide more reliable, efficient, and secure communication for connected hospitals, intensive care unit (ICU) monitoring, ambulance telemetry, and home-based chronic care environments.

Keywords

IoT healthcare; blockchain; software-defined networking; open network operating system controller; edge computing; smart contracts; medical Internet of Things

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