STHChain: A Scalable IoT-Fog-Blockchain Architecture with Lightweight Consensus for Secure Tourist Healthcare

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Seyed Rahman Soleimani Nadaf ¹

Masood Niazi Torshiz ²

Sayyed Majid Mazinani ³

Seyed Reza Kamel Tabbakh ¹

¹ Department of Computer Engineering, Ma.C., Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran.

² Department of Computer Engineering, Ma.C. Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran.

³ Department of Computer Engineering, Imam Reza International University, Mashhad, Iran.

10.22067/cke.2026.96829.1181

Abstract

Tourists’ healthcare maintenance, especially during the outbreak of infectious diseases, is a major challenge in the tourism industry. Ensuring accurate tourists’ healthcare data requires data collected using Internet of Things (IoT) devices within a smart city. Additionally, data integrity is preserved through storage on a blockchain platform to maintain reliability. Some works have addressed blockchain-based healthcare solutions for smart tourists, nevertheless many aspects require further investigation. Therefore, we propose a lightweight and scalable blockchain-based smart tourists healthcare model, called STHChain to present welfare services. The model first configures a hierarchical network of IoT devices, edge, and fog computing layers to collect, preprocess, and store tourists’ healthcare data. Subsequently, a smart contract defines formal Role-Based Access Control mechanisms for the model’s components, including sensor devices, edge nodes, fog nodes, hotels/hostels, welfare centers, and tourists. This contract also executes a deterministic function to classify tourists' health status based on sensor data, which governs their access to welfare service. Finally, healthcare data are included in blocks and verified using a proposed Raft-based Clustering consensus protocol called RaC to add the chain of blocks. The energy consumption and throughput of the model is evaluated using iFogSim simulator, demonstrating that it is energy-efficient, scalable and suitable for real-time tourist healthcare monitoring.

Keywords

Blockchain

Healthcare

Internet of Things

IoT

Smart City

Smart Tourist

Tourism

Welfare Services

Subjects

• Software Engineering Internet of Thing (IoT)

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