A COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF CLOUD, FOG, AND EDGE COMPUTING TECHNOLOGIES FOR
HEALTHCARE IoT SYSTEMS
Abstract
Cloud computing technology significantly emerged in various systems to
enhance the platform and infrastructure of services. Fog and Edge
computing technologies transform computing power and processing close to
the end-user and resolve many data processing challenges. Healthcare IoT
systems refer to using medical sensors and mobile computing to manage
patients’ conditions and use cloud-based technologies to transfer
collected patients’ data to the cloud computing storage. Many previous
research efforts focused on the use of edge, fog, and cloud computing
technologies in the field of healthcare IoT systems. However, no
previous research study summarized the main research topics and trends
in these research efforts. To that end, we conducted a systematic and
comprehensive empirical research study to understand the main research
topics and the employed computing technologies and trends in these
research topics. This study investigated 100 research studies focusing
on cloud-based technologies in the filed of healthcare IoT systems
published in highly reputable venues over the past decade. We created a
taxonomy of the main research topics of the investigated research
manuscripts and reported the main focus of these research efforts and
the trends in this field. Our investigation concluded that the
researchers mainly focused on the following five research topics: big
data, security, network latency, energy efficiency, and QoS. However,
some research topics are well studied while others are poorly
investigated and need more attention. We found that the highest number
of research papers focused on big data, i.e., 63% of the studied
papers, while the energy efficiency topic had the lowest number of
papers, i.e., 17% of the papers. Researchers and practitioners
interested in the cloud-based healthcare IoT systems can use our
findings to gear their work on the areas that are poorly investigated to
find better solutions.