MEC and D2D as Enabling Technologies for a Secure and Lightweight 6G eHealth System

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. Today, the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in support of education, medicine, business and administration has become a reality practically everywhere. In particular, the eHealth (digital Health) sector is on the cusp of a revolution, fueled by the worldwide health emergency due to the spread of the new coronavirus. With a view to developing new sixth generation (6G)-oriented architectures, advanced eHealth services like telemonitoring would benefit from the support of technologies that guarantee secure data access, ultra-low latency and very-high reliability targets, which are hardly achievable by the fifth generation (5G). This is the reason why this work proposes an eHealth system architecture, in which low-latency enabling technologies like Device-to-Device (D2D) communications and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) are integrated and supported by security mechanisms for an optimal management of sensitive health data collected by Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed framework is provided that shows promising results in terms of data security and latency reduction.