A novel decentralized trust evaluation model for secure mobile healthcare systems

Security is one of the most significant aspect in a mobile healthcare system. A number of methods are followed, in order to prevent malicious behaviour from revealing confidential information. The availability of pervasive communications as well as mobile accessories benefits the patients and healthcare units. MANET´s are one of the best examples of mobile healthcare units. In such networks, all mobile medical accessories are considered as mobile nodes. Hence, a Trust Evaluation model has been introduced which manages the nodes dynamically. In this model, all the nodes actions are regularly evaluated in an efficient and distributed manner. This model is used to obtain the trustworthiness of every node present in the network. It employs trust to evaluate the behaviour of every node, so that only authentic nodes are allowed to aid in communications, where as the misconduct of malicious nodes is effectively averted. This model helps the authentic nodes to avoid working for the misconducting nodes, as well as to detect these malicious ones. A authentic node will be rewarded for reliable behaviour, such as successfully forwarding packets and a malicious node will be penalized for unreliable behaviour, such as packet dropping. Thus, this trust evaluation model which is based on multicast system is helpful for the enhancement of the network´s reliability and security.