IoT-Cloud Service Optimization in Next Generation Smart Environments

The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on the evolution toward next generation smart environments (e.g., smart homes, buildings, and cities) will largely depend on the efficient integration of IoT and cloud computing technologies. With the predicted explosion in the number of connected devices and IoT services, current centralized cloud architectures, which tend to consolidate computing and storage resources into a few large data centers, will inevitably lead to excessive network load, end-to-end service latencies, and overall power consumption. Thanks to recent advances in network virtualization and programmability, highly distributed cloud networking architectures are a promising solution to efficiently host, manage, and optimize next generation IoT services in smart environments. In this paper, we mathematically formulate the service distribution problem (SDP) in IoT-Cloud networks, referred to as the IoT-CSDP, as a minimum cost mixed-cast flow problem that can be efficiently solved via linear programming. We focus on energy consumption as the major driver of today's network and cloud operational costs and characterize the heterogeneous set of IoT-Cloud network resources according to their associated sensing, computing, and transport capacity and energy efficiency. Our results show that, when properly optimized, the flexibility of IoT-Cloud networks can be efficiently exploited to deliver a wide range of IoT services in the context of next generation smart environments, while significantly reducing overall power consumption.