Home Gateway Solution to Secure and Reliable Patient Monitoring in a Medical Network

Abstract

In this paper analysis has been done on challenges to medical equipment networks and home patient monitoring using medical sensor networks. A possible solution is proposed and tested for implementation in the Kenya scenario. The rationale for this unique network is due to the fact that existing networks for conventional data used in business enterprises do not meet requirements which include equipment stability, redundancy, data transmission guarantee, automatic defense security, high speed link and centralized fault tolerance. Emphasized is a home extension gateway that transparently links medical sensors and imaging equipment at patients home or health centre to major medical resources as specialized equipment, databases and medical personnel. Target traffic for the network are biomedical signals and image streaming. Transport layer uses MINISIP set of protocols and network layer Open VPN which offers secure tunneling, virtual network interfaces and bridging as well as NAT and DNS forwarding. All possible internet connections are explored and implementation possibilities identified. Some security features implemented for interoperability include IP Tables and Easy IDS. Reliability was met by Quality of service with bandwidth guarantee by use of WDM on a 10Gb backbone fibre cable, multi-homing and virtualization of gateway. Various test beds were used to test security, reliability and network availability. When Bifrost operating system, which is a networking Linux distribution was used it resulted in successful deployment the Home extension gateway. Possibility of implementing the network in Kenya is explored and various possibilities are reported.