An Energy Efficient -aware Fog - enabled Cloud of Things Model for Healthcare

Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) represents the next groundbreaking change in information and communication technology (ICT) after the Internet. IoT is concerned with making everything connected and accessible through the Internet. However, IoT objects (things) are characterized by constrained computing and storage resources. Therefore, the Cloud of Things (CoT) paradigm that integrates the Cloud with IoT is proposed to meet the IoT requirements. This combination generates a new paradigm for pervasive and ubiquitous computing. In CoT, the IoT capabilities (e.g., sensing) are provisioned as services. Unfortunately, the two-tier CoT model is not efficient in the use cases sensitive to delays and energy consumption (e.g., in healthcare). Consequently, Fog Computing is proposed to support such IoT services and applications. This research analyses CoT architectures and platforms, as well as the implementation of CoT in the context of smart healthcare. Subsequently, the research explains some related issues of CoT, including the lack of standardization. Moreover, it focuses on energy efficiency with an in depth analysis of the most relevant proposals available in the literature. Furthermore, it proposes an energy-aware allocation algorithm for placing application modules (tasks) on Fog devices. Finally, the performance of the proposed strategy is evaluated in comparison with the default allocation and Cloud-only policies, using the iFogSim simulator. The proposed solution was observed to be more energy-efficient, saving approximately 2.72% of the energy compared to Cloud-only and approximately 1.6% of the energy compared to the Fog-default.