Towards Cloud-Based Decentralized Storage for Internet of Things Data

The Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon is creating a world of billions of connected devices generating enormous amounts of data. That data needs to be stored efficiently so that it can be retrieved easily on demand and acted upon. Current cloud-based solutions, focusing on centralized data collection and storage, would not be adequate for this task, given the sheer volume of data expected to be generated by IoT devices. Despite this, however, very little work has been reported on cloud-based storage tailored for IoT data. To that end, in this paper, we present a decentralized cloud-based storage solution specifically tailored for IoT data. The salient features of our solution are: usage of object storage (such as Ceph) for software-defined storage, and optimal distribution of data among distributed mini-Clouds, which are mini-data centers. We present approaches for the following: optimal mini-Cloud placement to minimize latency of data collection from IoT devices, and data migration among mini-Clouds with a view towards addressing storage capacity issues while minimizing access latency. Throughout our paper, we illustrate our ideas via a realistic running example in the Smart Cities domain, and present experimental results via a proof of concept prototype.