Lucy With Agents in the Sky: Trustworthiness of Cloud Storage for Industrial Internet of Things

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has the potential to transform several industries. However, reliable data collection, processing, and analytics cannot be performed if the underlying cloud storage is not trustworthy. The current IIoT architectures tend to adopt cloud computing as a backbone for their implementation and further deployment. Therefore, the trustworthiness of the cloud storage is of paramount importance for the design of efficient and reliable IIoT. This becomes very challenging if the data storage is outsourced to a third party, which may raise many problems such as noncompliance to service-level agreement, data theft, and privacy issues. Mobile agents have a number of characteristics including mobility, lightweight, autonomous, reactive, and intelligent making them ideal for deployment in many distributed applications. Therefore, in this article, we propose a multiagent-based approach to address the geolocation assurance problem of the outsourced data in the context of IIoT. As a result, we achieve efficient geolocation assurance with manageable costs without the need of a trusted third party.