Software-Defined Content Dissemination Scheme for Internet of Healthcare Vehicles in COVID-Like Scenarios

The exponential increase in the number of connected devices in the network led to a paradigm shift from the traditional host-centric IP-based network architecture to a content-based paradigm, which eliminates the address-content bindings in traditional IP-based architectures. In content-centric networking (CCN) architecture, contents are accessed by name rather than the physical location where these are stored, which results in more flexible and robust content-based architecture. However, the broadcast nature of devices in CCN causes network congestion and latency. The Internet of Healthcare Vehicles (IoHV) is an evolving paradigm that relies on smart transportation involving ambulances and other healthcare vehicles (for rapid COVID testing) to connect with each other through the Internet, especially in case like COVID 19 testing and contact tracing. However, the applications of IoHV are not similar to other networks and therefore bring new technical challenges due to high mobility and rapid changes of topology. Therefore, to handle these challenges, in this article, we propose a novel scheme that finds an optimal path. Using the optimal path, the interest packet is forwarded among healthcare vehicles in a smart city scenario. The proposed scheme maximizes the probability of finding the requested data while minimizing latency. As the proposed scheme does not involve broadcasting of interest packets, the problem of network congestion in CCN can be solved to a large extent. In order to facilitate the interoperability of heterogeneous healthcare devices in the network, and to improve the routing flexibility, an SDN controller is deployed in the IoHV scenario. It maintains the global information of the network in its flow tables. Moreover, to achieve faster response time and lower latency in the IoHV environment, edge devices are utilized instead of central cloud. Keeping in view the memory constraints of edge devices, deletable Bloom filters are used for storage and caching. Finally, the open issues and challenges related to the proposed solution for the IoHV scenario are also presented.