Adaptive Security at the Edge for 6G-Enabled Healthcare IoT

Healthcare IoT services increasingly rely on edge gateways to relay routine telemetry and deliver rare but timecritical alarms. Even short traffic bursts can inflate worstcase delay and interfere with urgent messages. We present NANOEDGEGUARD, a kernel-plane closed-loop controller that observes per-source traffic intensity at the edge and enforces an auditable, multi-tier rate policy using in-kernel traffic-control hooks. Unlike static firewall rules or user-space control loops, our design prioritizes fast actuation and explicit recovery through hysteresis, and it records policy transitions for auditability. Using a Raspberry Pi gateway hosting an MQTT broker and two ESP32 endpoints generating vitals, alarms, and a timed burst, we show that adaptive kernel-plane rate control reduces the 99th-percentile alarm RTT by 13.3% compared to a user-space firewall baseline while maintaining no-enforcement-level RTT, and it reduces excess admitted burst traffic by 46% compared to no enforcement. These early results indicate that adaptive, auditable enforcement at the gateway can improve resilience for healthcare IoT, and it can be extended toward on-demand policy deployment in future edge intelligence.