RCare: Extending Secure Health Care to Rural Area Using VANETs

In this paper, we propose a delay-tolerant secure long-term health care scheme, RCare, for collecting patient's sensitive personal health information (PHI). Specifically, to minimize the overall health care cost, RCare provides network connectivity to rural areas using conventional transportation vehicles (e.g., cars, buses) as relay nodes. These vehicles are expected to store, carry, and forward the PHI to the health-service-provider located mostly at the city area following an opportunistic routing. RCare improves network performance by providing incentive to the cooperative vehicles, and encompasses identity based cryptography to ensure security and privacy of the PHI during the routing period by using short digital signature and pseudo-identity. Network fairness and resistance to different possible attacks are also ensured by RCare. Extensive security and performance analyses demonstrate that RCare is able to achieve desired security requirements with effectiveness in terms of high delivery ratio with acceptable communication delay.