Software-defined networks-enabled fog computing for IoT-based healthcare: Security, challenges and opportunities

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a crucial technology in the healthcare industry thanks to recent developments in automated data collection. Current statistics of the healthcare sector show that it is expanding at a remarkable rate. However, the performance of the healthcare system is impacted by many challenges, such as security, privacy, latency, scalability, and heterogeneity that come with advancement. Fog computing and software-defined networks (SDN) are critical enabling technologies that help to improve IoT-based healthcare systems by ensuring timely and reliable data provisioning for use in healthcare applications. SDN solves interoperability, device management, and network management issues and automates patient health monitoring without human interaction. SDN and fog computing in IoT-based healthcare can optimize device communication and computing power at a low cost. SDN-enabled fog computing has lower latency and better security than cloud-based IoT healthcare architecture. The researchers have not entirely discovered SDN-enabled fog computing to the best of our knowledge. This paper covers healthcare IoT technicalities and related technologies. We examined ways to merge SDN, fog computing, and IoT to improve healthcare solutions. Finally, we concluded the paper with research issues and future healthcare system improvements.