A Novel Hierarchical Group-Based Overlay Healthcare Network

Abstract

In the healthcare domain, there is a challenge on how to design a scalable, dynamic, robust and secure network for provisioning personalized healthcare services remotely with an efficient and accurate manner. In the present work, motivated by innovations in the networking domain and the benefits of clustering in the peer-to-peer networks as well as the group-based approach of the social networks, we propose a novel hierarchical peer-to-peer overlay healthcare network for communication and collaboration among healthcare professionals, paramedical staff and patients. The proposed network includes two types of hierarchy: the first type is used for regular requests and communication while the second type handles emergency requests. The network architecture is based on multiple and enhanced structured overlays that provide scalability, dynamic features, load-balancing and low response times with guaranteed information retrieval. Moreover, a novel and effective lookup mechanism supports complex queries with significantly lower response time and messaging overhead.