A Blockchain-Based Scheme for Secure Data Offloading in Healthcare With Deep Reinforcement Learning

With the widespread popularity of the Internet of Things and various intelligent medical devices, the amount of medical data is rising sharply, and thus medical data processing has become increasingly challenging. Mobile edge computing technology allows computing power to be allocated at the edge closer to users, which enables efficient data offloading for healthcare systems. However, existing studies on medical data offloading seldom guarantee effective data privacy and security. Moreover, the research equipping data offloading architectures with Blockchain neglect the delay and energy consumption costs incurred in using Blockchain technology for medical data offloading. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a data offloading scheme for healthcare based on Blockchain technology, which achieves optimal medical resource allocation and simultaneously minimizes the cost of offloading tasks. Specifically, we design a smart contract to ensure secure data offloading. And, we formulate the cost problem as a Markov Decision Process, solved by a policy search-based deep reinforcement learning (Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic) scheme, where we jointly consider offloading decisions, allocation of computing resources and radio transmission bandwidth, and Blockchain data security audits. The security of our smart-contract-based mechanism is theoretically and empirically proved, while extensive experimental results also show that our solution can obtain superior performance gains with lower cost than other baselines.