Modeling the availability of an e-health system integrated with edge, fog and cloud infrastructures

The Internet of Things has the potential of transforming health systems through the collection and analysis of patient physiological data via wearable devices and sensor networks. Such systems can offer assisted living services in realtime and offer a range of multimedia-based health services. However, lack of service availability, particularly in the cases of emergencies, can lead to adverse outcomes and in the worst case, death. In this paper, we propose an e-health monitoring architecture based on sensors and cloud and fog infrastructure scenarios. Further, we propose stochastic models to analyze how failures impact on the e-health system availability. We analyze four different scenarios and from results, we identify that the sensors and fog devices are the components that have the most significant impact on the availability of the entire e-health system in the scenarios analyzed.