A Communication and Computation Converged Framework for Sustainable IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand and increasingly integrate into day-to-day life supporting multiple applications ranging from smart homes, and smart cities to autonomous vehicles and healthcare. Developing a sustainable IoT architecture to accommodate advanced applications presents a global challenge. A critical aspect of this challenge is ensuring energy efficiency while supporting a vast array of IoT devices and their service level agreements. A layered IoT architecture, encompassing edge, fog, and cloud layers, offers a viable solution to support these varied IoT applications. By optimally selecting nodes for processing incoming IoT requests from different use cases, energy efficiency can be significantly enhanced. In our research, we have developed frameworks for node selection across the edge-fog-cloud layers using Integer Linear Programming (ILP), and meta-heuristic methods. The frameworks we have implemented ensure not only energy efficiency but also adherence to the network and application-specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. The proposed frameworks will be implemented in an event-driven simulation environment to validate their effectiveness in real-time network applications.