GTSIM-POP: Game theory based secure incentive mechanism and patient-optimized privacy-preserving packet forwarding scheme in m-healthcare social networks

M-healthcare social networks are becoming increasingly important in supporting an efficient and promising e-healthcare platform. The moving patients suffering from the same disease or living in the neighborhood of the same healthcare provider constitute a delay tolerant network (DTN) to help each other forwarding the patient health information (PHI). Unfortunately, the mobile device carried on each patient collecting PHI from body sensors is subjected to sophisticated attacks. To reduce the probability of patients being threatened by a newly identified target node compromise attack, maximize the credits earned from transmitting packets and achieve the fairness among patients, a game theory based secure incentive mechanism GTSIM is proposed. Based on it, by exploiting the complete marriage theory in combinatorics, a patient-optimized privacy-preserving packet forwarding scheme POP is devised to protect the PHI confidentiality and the identity/location privacy of the patients, decrease the privacy exposure when intermediate patients are compromised and realize the property of patient-optimization required in m-healthcare systems. Last but not least, the security analysis shows both our proposed GTSIM and POP can resist various sophisticated attacks and the extensive simulation demonstrates the practicability and efficiency with high message delivery ratio, obtainable utility fraction and low average latency.