Edge computing-enabled body area networks

Edge computing paradigm has attracted many interests in the last few years as a valid alternative to the standard Cloud-based approaches to reduce the huge amount of data coming from IoT devices toward the Internet. In this direction, the paper proposes BodyEdge, a novel architecture well suited for medical applications in the context of the emerging healthcare industry. The advantages of the designed software platform have been evaluated in terms of reduced bandwidth and processing time through a real testbed on different hardware platforms. The conducted study also discovered the network conditions (data load and processing delay) in which BodyEdge is a valid and inexpensive solution for healthcare application scenarios.