Recently, researchers around the world in medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies are demanding a wider access to healthcare data for secondary use in order to provide enhanced and personalized medical services. For this purpose, healthcare information exchange between health authorities can be leveraged as a fundamental concept to meet these demands and enable the discovery of new insights and cures. However, health data are highly sensitive and private information that requires strong authentication and authorization procedures to manage the access to them. In this regard, the cloud paradigm has been used in these e-healthcare solutions, but they remain inefficient due to their inability to adapt to the expanding volume of data generated from body sensors and their vulnerability against cyberattacks. Hence, collaborative and distributed data governance supported by edge computing and blockchain promises enormous potentials in improving the performance and security of the whole system. In this paper, we present a secure and efficient data management framework, named "EdgeMediChain", for sharing health data. The proposed architecture leverages both edge computing and blockchain to facilitate and provide the necessary requirements for a healthcare ecosystem in terms of scalability, security, as well as privacy. The Ethereum-based testbed evaluations show the effectiveness of EdgeMediChain in terms of execution time with a reduction of nearly 84.75% for 2000 concurrent transactions, higher throughput compared to a traditional blockchain, and scalable ledger storage with a linear growth rate. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, data sharing, edge computing, electronic medical records, healthcare, internet of things, privacy, security, smart contracts.
The concept of the internet of energy (IoE) emerged as an innovative paradigm to encompass all the complex and intertwined notions relevant to the transition of current smart grids towards more decarbonization, digitalization and decentralization. With a focus on the two last aspects, the amount of intelligent devices being connected in a scattered way to the existing power grid is ever-growing. Nevertheless, guaranteeing a cyber-secure and resilient control of these IoE components as well as a seamless and reliable delivery of electricity services, such as renewable energy exchange, electric vehicles charging, demand response, and so forth; might be the bottleneck of current power systems that are largely still functioning following a centralized approach. Thus, the future power grid would gradually incorporate a growing number of distributed-based control schemes to deal with this challenge. And many believe that blockchain could be a key-enabler in this transition, due to its consistent characteristics with multiple requirements of future power systems. In this paper, we provide an extensive state-of-the-art of blockchain-based additions to the IoE. Where, we first introduce various concepts related to blockchain and discuss the rationale behind its adoption in the context of IoE. Then, differently from the existing body of literature surveys, we do not only provide a taxonomy and evaluate a wide range of recent research outputs that integrated blockchain within modern power systems. But we also draw some valuable lessons learned for each studied category and discuss the intersection of blockchain with various emerging paradigms that have the potential of radically impacting the smart grid. In addition, we present some real-world industrial initiatives and ongoing projects built on top of blockchain, dedicated for offering diverse electricity services with a case study of a pilot project on energy trading in Amsterdam. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and worthwhile opportunities of deploying blockchain in this particular area, with a focus on the aspect of operational cyber-security.
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