Cloud challenges for networked embedded systems: A review

Networked embedded systems have been increasingly deployed in key application areas such as healthcare, home automation, industrial machines, large scale military and environmental monitoring. This has enabled the cyber-physical systems paradigm through wireless sensor networks (WSN) which collect, store, process and transmit information about a focused physical process or system to evolve. One of the key challenges with this approach is handling in an efficient manner the large quantities of data that are being generated in real-time, and extracting the high-level information pieces that are to be presented to the stakeholders and end users. Both the data storage and communication infrastructure also raise security issues at both the decentralized, node-level, and at the central levels. To this extent, cloud-based services and frameworks offer a promising alternative to storing, analyzing and securing sensor data. The paper surveys the main developments in cloud services for handling and securing sensor data at a large scale with quality of service constraints in order to deliver the intended data to the end users.