  The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread rapidly in late 2019, has revealed that
the use of computing and communication technologies provides significant aid in
preventing, controlling, and combating infectious diseases. With the ongoing
research in next-generation networking (NGN), the use of secure and reliable
communication and networking is of utmost importance when dealing with users'
health records and other sensitive information. Through the adaptation of
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled NGN, the shape of healthcare systems can
be altered to achieve smart and secure healthcare capable of coping with
epidemics that may emerge at any given moment. In this article, we envision a
cooperative and distributed healthcare framework that relies on
state-of-the-art computing, communication, and intelligence capabilities,
namely, Federated Learning (FL), mobile edge computing (MEC), and Blockchain,
to enable epidemic (or suspicious infectious disease) discovery, remote
monitoring, and fast health-authority response. The introduced framework can
also enable secure medical data exchange at the edge and between different
health entities. Such a technique, coupled with the low latency and high
bandwidth functionality of 5G and beyond networks, would enable mass
surveillance, monitoring and analysis to occur at the edge. Challenges, issues,
and design guidelines are also discussed in this article with highlights on
some trending solutions.
