Correlation Anomaly Detection With Multiple Primary Attributes in Collaborative Device–Edge–Cloud Network

Anomaly detection is playing an increasingly important role in Internet of Things applications since anomalous events may cause some damage to the physical–social environment monitored by different kinds of smart object devices. In some cases, the occurrence of an anomalous event is caused by the fusion impact derived from several primary monitoring factors. Considering this, we propose a novel anomaly detection mechanism for the events with multiple decisive primary attributes in a collaborative device–edge–cloud architecture, in which a propagation and influence-based correlation is further explored in the edge layer for improving the detection efficiency. During the detection process, multiple primary attributes first cooperate to detect an anomaly in the edge layer in advance. If an anomaly occurs in the subregion managed by an edge device, social-aware interaction relationships between edge devices are further integrated to give a guidance on the detection of correlative anomaly in neighbor subregions. The cloud further analyzes the primary attributes information and the interaction relationship to determine the secondary attributes that are helpful in identifying the final anomaly. A large number of experiments show that our method is superior to the alternative methods in terms of energy consumption, detection time, and accuracy.