Maximizing Profit of the Service Providers through Efficient Content Placement and Retrieval in an IoT-enabled Edge-Cloud Platform

In today’s 5G era, the amount of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices is enormous. Data is processed and stored in the cloud under a traditional cloud computing architecture, and real-time processing and retrieval of these data is time-consuming. Therefore, an edge-cloud framework comes in handy where the content generated is placed on the edge nodes of the network, and it can reach the endusers in a time-bound manner. A majority of the previous research works on content placement under the edge-cloud architecture primarily aimed at improving the latency of the system. However, the approach proposed in this paper aims to maximize the profit of the service provider by effectively placing the content in a hierarchically organized edge-cloud network. We propose two strategies and compare them with random and greedy approaches for both synthetic and real data sets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies, and the profit of the service providers increases by 38.81% (maximum) and 10.51% (on average) for the synthetic dataset and by 65.74% (maximum) and 22.83% (on average) for the real-world dataset when compared with the greedy approach.