  The healthcare industry has witnessed significant transformations in e-health
services by using mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain to facilitate
healthcare operations. Many MEC-blockchain-based schemes have been proposed,
but some critical technical challenges still remain, such as low quality of
services (QoS), data privacy and system security vulnerabilities. In this
paper, we propose a new decentralized health architecture, called BEdgeHealth
that integrates MEC and blockchain for data offloading and data sharing in
distributed hospital networks. First, a data offloading scheme is proposed
where mobile devices can offload health data to a nearby MEC server for
efficient computation with privacy awareness. Moreover, we design a data
sharing scheme which enables data exchanges among healthcare users by
leveraging blockchain and interplanetary file system. Particularly, a smart
contract-based authentication mechanism is integrated with MEC to perform
decentralized user access verification at the network edge without requiring
any central authority. The real-world experiment results and evaluations
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BEdgeHealth architecture in terms
of improved QoS with data privacy and security guarantees, compared to the
existing schemes.
