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The internet of things (IoT) refers to a network of physical devices that are embedded with sensors, software, and network connectivity, allowing them to collect and share data. The devices are the core of any IoT ecosystem. Browsing the extant literature, it emerges that the meaning of the term device depends on the reference context. It follows that, it is an important topic to investigate the reasons behind such a degree of indeterminacy. This paper elaborates on the evolution of the concept of device moving from IoT to artificial intelligence of things (AIoT). The finding that comes from this study is that this evolution is a direct consequence of the evolution of the IoT computing paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Patient care, research, and decision-making are all aided by real-time medical data analysis in today’s rapidly developing healthcare system. The significance of this research comes in the fact that it has the ability to completely change the healthcare system by relocating computing resources closer to the data source, hence facilitating more rapid and accurate analysis of medical data. Latency, privacy concerns, and inability to scale are common in traditional cloud-centric techniques. With their ability to process data close to where it is created, edge and fog computing have the potential to revolutionize medical analysis. The healthcare industry has unique opportunities and problems for the application of edge and fog computing. There must be an emphasis on data security and privacy, workload flexibility, interoperability, resource optimization, and data integration without any interruptions. In this research, it is suggested the Adaptive Heuristic Edge assisted Fog Computing design (AHE-FCD) to solve these issues using a novel architecture meant to improve medical analysis. Together, edge devices and fog nodes may perform distributed data processing and analytics with the help of AHE-FCD. Heuristic algorithms are often employed for optimization issues that establishing an optimum solution using standard approaches is difficult and impossible. Heuristic algorithms utilize search algorithms to explore the search space and identify a result. Improved patient care, medical research, and healthcare process efficiency are all possible to AHE-FCD real-time, low-latency analysis at the edge and fog layers. Improved medical analysis with minimal latency, high reliability, and data privacy are all likely to emerge from the study’s findings. As a result, rather from being centralized, operations in a sophisticated distributed system occur at several end points. That helps the situation quicker to detect possible dangers prior to propagate across the network. The AHE-FCD is a promising breakthrough that moves us closer to the realization of advanced medical analysis systems, where prompt and well-informed decision-making is essential to providing excellent healthcare.

The proliferation of the IoT has led to the development of diverse application architectures to optimize IoT systems' deployment, operation, and maintenance. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the existing IoT application architectures, highlighting their key features, strengths, and limitations. The architectures are categorized based on their deployment models, such as cloud, edge, and fog computing approaches, each offering distinct advantages regarding scalability, latency, and resource efficiency. Cloud architectures leverage centralized data processing and storage capabilities to support large-scale IoT applications but often suffer from high latency and bandwidth constraints. Edge architectures mitigate these issues by bringing computation closer to the data source, enhancing real-time processing, and reducing network congestion. Fog architectures combine the strengths of both cloud and edge paradigms, offering a balanced solution for complex IoT environments. This survey also examines emerging trends and technologies in IoT application management, such as the solutions provided by the major IoT service providers like Intel, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP. Through this study, the survey identifies latency, privacy, and deployment difficulties as key areas for future research. It highlights the need to advance IoT Edge architectures to reduce network traffic, improve data privacy, and enhance interoperability by developing multi-application and multi-protocol edge gateways for efficient IoT application management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patient care, research, and decision-making are all aided by real-time medical data analysis in today's rapidly developing healthcare system. The significance of this research comes in the fact that it has the ability to completely change the healthcare system by relocating computing resources closer to the data source, hence facilitating more rapid and accurate analysis of medical data. Latency, privacy concerns, and inability to scale are common in traditional cloud-centric techniques. With their ability to process data close to where it is created, edge and fog computing have the potential to revolutionize medical analysis. The healthcare industry has unique opportunities and problems for the application of edge and fog computing. There must be an emphasis on data security and privacy, workload flexibility, interoperability, resource optimization, and data integration without any interruptions. In this research, it is suggested the Adaptive Heuristic Edge assisted Fog Computing design (AHE-FCD) to solve these issues using a novel architecture meant to improve medical analysis. Together, edge devices and fog nodes may perform distributed data processing and analytics with the help of AHE-FCD. Heuristic algorithms are often employed for optimization issues that establishing an optimum solution using standard approaches is difficult and impossible. Heuristic algorithms utilize search algorithms to explore the search space and identify a result. Improved patient care, medical research, and healthcare process efficiency are all possible to AHE-FCD real-time, low-latency analysis at the edge and fog layers. Improved medical analysis with minimal latency, high reliability, and data privacy are all likely to emerge from the study's findings. As a result, rather from being centralized, operations in a sophisticated distributed system occur at several end points. That helps the situation quicker to detect possible dangers prior to propagate across the network. The AHE-FCD is a promising breakthrough that moves us closer to the realization of advanced medical analysis systems, where prompt and well-informed decision-making is essential to providing excellent healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enormous data generated by IoT devices are handled in processing and storage by edge computing, a paradigm that allows tasks to be processed outside host devices. Task offloading is the movement of tasks from IoT devices to an edge or cloud server -where resources and processing capabilities are abundant-for processing, it is an important aspect of edge computing. This paper reviewed some task-offloading algorithms and the techniques used by each algorithm. Existing algorithms focus on either latency, load, cost, energy or delay, the deep reinforcement phase of a task offloading algorithm automates and optimizes the offloading decision process, it trains agents and defines rewards. Latency-aware phase then proceeds to obtain the best offload destination in order to significantly reduce the latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the timing performance of a persistent storage designed for distributed container-based architectures in industrial control applications. The timing performance analysis is conducted using an in-house simulator, which mirrors our testbed specifications. The storage ensures data availability and consistency even in presence of faults. The analysis considers four aspects: 1. placement strategy, 2. design options, 3. data size, and 4. evaluation under faulty conditions. Experimental results considering the timing constraints in industrial applications indicate that the storage solution can meet critical deadlines, particularly under specific failure patterns. Comparison results also reveal that, while the method may underperform current centralized solutions in fault-free conditions, it outperforms the centralized solutions in failure scenario. Moreover, the used evaluation method is applicable for assessing other container-based critical applications with timing constraints that require persistent storage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To perform a set of tasks in a robotic network cloud system as fast as possible, it is recommended to use a scheduling approach that minimizes the makespan. The makespan is defined as the time between the start of the first scheduled task and the completion of all scheduled tasks. Load balancing is a technique to distribute incoming tasks across processing units in a way that the resource utilization is optimized and the makespan is minimized. Robotic network cloud systems can be conceptualized as graphs, with nodes representing hardware with independent computing power and edges representing data transmissions between the nodes. The initial scheduler assigns a set of newly arrived tasks to the processing units capable of performing them. To reduce the response time we can replicate some of the tasks and assign them to different processing units. This results in some tasks becoming redundant. Assigning redundant tasks refers to determining which processing unit should receive the replicated tasks. Load balancing for redundant allocation can be viewed as assigning tasks to multiple processing units with different resource sizes so that the load is evenly distributed among the units. We propose a technique for load balancing, the ordered balancing algorithm, to minimize the makespan in the redundant allocation and scheduling problem. We prove theoretically the correctness of the proposed algorithm and illustrate with simulations, using R version 4.0.3, the obtained results that outperform other recent load balancing proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, a large amount of data is being generated and these data are usually stored in distributed environments such as cloud, fog, and edge environments. Data replication, which is commonly used to manage large amounts of data, improves overall accessibility and availability. Due to the importance of data replication, a lot of research has been done on replication methods in these environments. In this paper, a systematic review has been conducted to analyze the existing studies on data replication methods in cloud, fog, edge, and edge-cloud environments. The advantages, disadvantages, and some of the main challenges of the existing methods are explained and a taxonomy of data replication methods is provided. The selected papers are analyzed based on various criteria related to data replication, such as recovery, storage cost, load balancing, replica consistency, security, mobility, and data migration. Finally, the open issues and future research directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the inadequacy of medical facilities in rural communities and the high number of patients affected by ailments that need to be treated immediately is of prime importance for all countries. The various recent healthcare emergency situations bring out the importance of telemedicine and demand rapid transportation of patients to nearby hospitals with available resources to provide the required medical care. Many current healthcare facilities and ambulances are not equipped to provide real-time risk assessment for each patient and dynamically provide the required medical interventions. This work proposes an IoT-based mobile medical edge (IM2E) node to be integrated with wearable and portable devices for the continuous monitoring of emergency patients transported via ambulances and it delves deeper into the existing challenges, such as (a) a lack of a simplified patient risk scoring system, (b) the need for architecture that enables seamless communication for dynamically varying QoS requirements, and (c)the need for context-aware knowledge regarding the effect of end-to-end delay and the packet loss ratio (PLR) on the real-time monitoring of health risks in emergency patients. The proposed work builds a data path selection model to identify the most effective path through which to route the data packets in an effective manner. The signal-to-noise interference ratio and the fading in the path are chosen to analyze the suitable path for data transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of the IoT has led to the development of diverse application architectures to optimize IoT systems’ deployment, operation, and maintenance. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the existing IoT application architectures, highlighting their key features, strengths, and limitations. The architectures are categorized based on their deployment models, such as cloud, edge, and fog computing approaches, each offering distinct advantages regarding scalability, latency, and resource efficiency. Cloud architectures leverage centralized data processing and storage capabilities to support large-scale IoT applications but often suffer from high latency and bandwidth constraints. Edge architectures mitigate these issues by bringing computation closer to the data source, enhancing real-time processing, and reducing network congestion. Fog architectures combine the strengths of both cloud and edge paradigms, offering a balanced solution for complex IoT environments. This survey also examines emerging trends and technologies in IoT application management, such as the solutions provided by the major IoT service providers like Intel, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP. Through this study, the survey identifies latency, privacy, and deployment difficulties as key areas for future research. It highlights the need to advance IoT Edge architectures to reduce network traffic, improve data privacy, and enhance interoperability by developing multi-application and multi-protocol edge gateways for efficient IoT application management.

The healthcare sector is witnessing rapid transformation with the rise of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). This presents unpar-alleled opportunities for continuous, personalized health surveillance. To truly tap into the IoMT's capabilities, it's essential to employ a flexible and robust data processing framework. In this article, we introduce a comprehensive four-tiered architecture tailored for the IoMT. This model, which we foresee as a benchmark for similar platforms, spans from interconnected devices to an edge computing layer, extends through a fog computing level, and culminates in the cloud. To bolster the system's resilience and features, two cross-sectional layers - one centered on security, and the other on artificial intelligence (AI) - are integrated across the four tiers. Additionally, we outline strategies for efficient load balancing, enhancing overall system performance. This initiative marks a pivotal advancement in IoMT architectural standardization, setting the stage for broader, more effective deployment in healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects diverse devices to provide digital services globally. Edge computing, a new model, processes data at the network edge for faster responses. This paper discusses IoT architecture, protocols, computing models, and the benefits and challenges they pose. It highlights the need for high-performance IoT applications, especially in critical scenarios, and suggests that Edge computing can enhance efficiency and privacy by processing data where it's produced. Environmental impacts of cloud-based data management and the sustainability of Edge computing are also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT), eHealth is becoming an increasingly attractive area for researchers. However, different challenges arise when sensor-generated information is stored and analyzed using cloud computing. Latency, response time, and security are critical concerns that require attention. Fog and Edge Computing technologies have emerged in response to the requirement for resources near the network edge where data is collected, to minimize cloud challenges. This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques when executed in Edge or Fog nodes within the eHealth data. We compared the most efficient baseline techniques from the state-of-the-art on three eHealth datasets: Human Activity Recognition (HAR), University of Milano Bicocca Smartphone-based Human Activity Recognition (UniMiB SHAR), and MIT-BIH Arrhythmia. The experiment showed that for the HAR dataset, the Support Vector Machines (SVM) model was the best performer among the ML techniques, with low processing time and an accuracy of 96%. In comparison, the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) performed 94.43, and 96%, respectively, for SHAR and MIT-BIH datasets. Among the DL techniques, the Convolutional Neural Network with Fourier (CNNF) model performed the best, with accuracies of 94.49% and 98.72% for HAR and MIT-BIH. In comparison, CNN achieved 96.90% for the SHAR dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the inadequacy of medical facilities in rural communities and the high number of patients affected by ailments that need to be treated immediately is of prime importance for all countries. The various recent healthcare emergency situations bring out the importance of telemedicine and demand rapid transportation of patients to nearby hospitals with available resources to provide the required medical care. Many current healthcare facilities and ambulances are not equipped to provide real-time risk assessment for each patient and dynamically provide the required medical interventions. This work proposes an IoT-based mobile medical edge (IM2E) node to be integrated with wearable and portable devices for the continuous monitoring of emergency patients transported via ambulances and it delves deeper into the existing challenges, such as (a) a lack of a simplified patient risk scoring system, (b) the need for architecture that enables seamless communication for dynamically varying QoS requirements, and (c)the need for context-aware knowledge regarding the effect of end-to-end delay and the packet loss ratio (PLR) on the real-time monitoring of health risks in emergency patients. The proposed work builds a data path selection model to identify the most effective path through which to route the data packets in an effective manner. The signal-to-noise interference ratio and the fading in the path are chosen to analyze the suitable path for data transmission.

The cloud continuum concept has drawn increasing attention from practitioners, academics, and funding agencies and been adopted progressively. However, the concept remains mired in various definitions with different studies providing contrasting descriptions. Therefore, to understand the concept of cloud continuum and to provide its definition, in this work we conduct a systematic mapping study of the literature investigating the different definitions, how they evolved, and where does the cloud continue. The main outcome of this work is a complete definition that merges all the common aspects of cloud continuum, which enables practitioners and researchers to better understand what cloud continuum is.

Existing approaches for allocating resources on edge environments are inefficient and lack the support of heterogeneous edge devices, which in turn fail to optimize the dependency on cloud infrastructures or datacenters. To this extent, we propose in this paper OpERA, a multi-layered edge-based resource allocation optimization framework that supports heterogeneous and seamless execution of offloadable tasks across edge, fog, and cloud computing layers and architectures. By capturing offloadable task requirements, OpERA is capable of identifying suitable resources within nearby edge or fog layers, thus optimizing the execution process. Throughout the paper, we present results which show the effectiveness of our proposed optimization strategy in terms of reducing costs, minimizing energy consumption, and promoting other residual gains in terms of processing computations, network bandwidth, and task execution time. We also demonstrate that by optimizing resource allocation in computation offloading, it is then possible to increase the likelihood of successful task offloading, particularly for computationally intensive tasks that are becoming integral as part of many IoT applications such robotic surgery, autonomous driving, smart city monitoring device grids, and deep learning tasks. The evaluation of our OpERA optimization algorithm reveals that the TOPSIS MCDM technique effectively identifies optimal compute resources for processing offloadable tasks, with a 96% success rate. Moreover, the results from our experiments with a diverse range of use cases show that our OpERA optimization strategy can effectively reduce energy consumption by up to 88%, and operational costs by 76%, by identifying relevant compute resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that connects devices of different types and characteristics through a network. The massive quantity of the heterogeneous generated data by the sensors imposes many challenges in making these data available to IoT applications. Data reduction and preprocessing are promising concepts that help to handle these data efficiently before storing them. Applying data reduction methods at the edge has emerged as an efficient solution. In such context, this systematic mapping is intended to investigate the data reduction solutions performed exclusively at the edge through a set of research questions. To reach this objective, we performed a Systematic Literature Mapping (SLM) in which 35 papers were strictly analyzed among a total of 853 articles. Finally, we present the results of these analyses answering questions that relate to the researcher's used techniques, hardware technologies, used data type, and contributed objects to perform the data reduction techniques on the edge of the IoT systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient task processing and data storage are still among the most important challenges in Autonomous Driving (AD). In-board processing units struggle to deal with the workload of AD tasks, especially for Artificial Intelligence (AI) based applications. Cloud and Fog computing represent good opportunities to overcome the limitation of in-board processing capacities. However, communication delays and task real-time constraints are the main issues to be considered during the task mapping. Also, a fair resources allocation is a miss-explored concept in the context of AD task offloading where the mobility increases its complexity. We propose a task offloading simulation tool and approaches based on intelligent agents. Agents at the edge and the fog communicate and exchange their knowledge and history. We show results and proof-of-concept scenarios that illustrate our multi-agent-based proposition and task offloading simulation tool. We also analyze the impact of communication delays and processing units constraints on AD task offloading issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development and operations (DevOps), artificial intelligence (AI), big data and edge–fog–cloud are disruptive technologies that may produce a radical transformation of the industry. Nevertheless, there are still major challenges to efficiently applying them in order to optimise productivity. Some of them are addressed in this article, concretely, with respect to the adequate management of information technology (IT) infrastructures for automated analysis processes in critical fields such as the mining industry. In this area, this paper presents a tool called Pangea aimed at automatically generating suitable execution environments for deploying analytic pipelines. These pipelines are decomposed into various steps to execute each one in the most suitable environment (edge, fog, cloud or on-premise) minimising latency and optimising the use of both hardware and software resources. Pangea is focused in three distinct objectives: (1) generating the required infrastructure if it does not previously exist; (2) provisioning it with the necessary requirements to run the pipelines (i.e., configuring each host operative system and software, install dependencies and download the code to execute); and (3) deploying the pipelines. In order to facilitate the use of the architecture, a representational state transfer application programming interface (REST API) is defined to interact with it. Therefore, in turn, a web client is proposed. Finally, it is worth noting that in addition to the production mode, a local development environment can be generated for testing and benchmarking purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From smart vehicles to smart city sensors, the millions of new devices connected over the next few years will generate huge amounts of highly personal data that needs to be processed in real time. Transmitting this data to the cloud, with its centralized data centers and high latency, is both economically and technically unviable. As a result, the industry is moving towards processing data closer to the source, a major shift from the cloud to the so-called edge. This new architecture is understood as a necessary augmentation to the cloud. Indeed, in many ways, the edge is the polar opposite of the cloud: ad hoc networks, composed of resource-poor devices, that function at the hyperlocal level of the home, office, or neighborhood. However, this article argues that such technical supplementation is also about control, filling a critical void in contemporary formations of power. Coupled together, this cloud-edge formation is both centralized and decentralized, resource intense yet geographically dispersed. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, such power augments heavy, situated force with a more flexible, economic architecture – conforming to a trajectory of 'intensification' while also complicating it. While each mode of power has certain strengths and weaknesses, combining their operations forms a twinned power with new capacities for subjectivation and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of sensor technology in our daily lives has brought comfort, convenience, and improved health over the past few decades. Technological advances further expanded the use of medical sensors by reducing their size and costs. Medical sensors improve the intelligence and capabilities of healthcare services including, remote health monitoring, surgical procedures, therapy, and rehabilitation. We present a comprehensive review of medical sensors in the last 50 years focusing on their deployment in healthcare applications. The review also discusses the role of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in enhancing the capabilities of sensor technologies for the healthcare domain. Moreover, we also investigate the benefits and challenges of various integrated architectures which have been proposed recently to seamlessly integrate heterogeneous medical sensors with emerging technologies and paradigms that include edge, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), fog, and cloud computing technologies. Finally, we identify future challenges that must be addressed to achieve the maximum potential and benefits of medical sensor technologies and ultimately provide robust, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective healthcare delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este trabajo proporciona una visión general del paradigma Internet de las Cosas (IoT) apuntando a las aplicaciones, arquitecturas, protocolos, tecnologías, y problemas pendientes y oportunidades para la investigación, tal como puede encontrarse en literatura reciente. El trabajo comienza proveyendo marcos históricos y conceptuales breves. A continuación, se profundiza en temas teóricos como las soluciones verticales, arquitecturas propuestas, protocolos específicos y tecnologías comerciales. También se revisan problemas concernientes al marco legal, todavía por desarrollarse. El postulado básico de IoT es la colaboración entre sensores inteligentes para realizar tareas innovadoras sin intervención humana. Sin embargo, avances recientes indican que serán posibles aplicaciones más potentes combinando IoT con cierto grado de inteligencia, previamente reservado a la nube. El objetivo principal de este informe es proporcionar un marco de trabajo inicial que permita a los investigadores iniciarse rápidamente en la materia, y al mismo tiempo, enfatizar la importancia de la identificación y desarrollo de aplicaciones. El trabajo concluye recomendando especial atención al modelado de sistemas IoT, a los protocolos de aplicación de tiempo real, y a la computación fog.

In order to support a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city applications, it is necessary to provide computing and networking resources at cloud, fog and edge levels. Fortunately, evolution of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies are greatly supporting operators to deploy their data centers at reduced expenditures by integrating cloud, fog and edge (Cloud-Fog-Edge) platforms. Although Cloud-Fog-Edge environments provide economic platforms, due to their multi-tenant sharing platforms customer applications could face a variety of security issues in terms of networking and computing resources. For instance, in cloud environments Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and authentication mechanisms are useful for enforcing security policies and improving operational security, but internal malicious users can do Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) spoofing attacks by exploiting shared networking environments. Mainly, ARP spoofing attacks could lead to VLAN-ID spoofing, Denial of Service (DoS) and distributed DoS (DDoS), Man in the Middle (MITM) and session hijack attacks in the network. In this work we are proposing a Denial of ARP Spoofing (D-ARPSpoof) approach to prevent ARP spoofing in SDN and NFV enabled Cloud-Fog-Edge platforms. Unlike existing IDS and anomaly detection systems, D-ARPSpoof prevents ARP spoofing attacks by reducing overhead towards the centralized controllers and OpenFlow switches. In this work, D-ARPSpoof performance is compared with recent ARP spoofing mitigation approaches and anomaly detection systems using important metrics like number of successful connections, controller processing messages overhead and number of flow rules installed in OpenFlow switches. In results, we found that in comparison with existing approaches D-ARPSpoof successfully prevents all malicious connections at reduced overhead towards controllers and switches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the design and implementation of a hierarchical and multilayered computing framework, specifically tailored to analyze the benefits of Named Data Networking (NDN) enabled microservice-centric in-network computations in autonomous vehicular networks. The proposed framework comprises three layers: an autonomous vehicular network layer, an Edge computing layer, and a centralized Cloud.Modifications were made to the vanilla NDN codebase to facilitate communication between the vehicular network layer, Edge computing and Cloud layer, utilizing the C++ Boost Asio library and IP tunneling mechanism. A microservices-based driver assistance application, consisting of various heterogeneous microservices, was emulated in.NET Core and deployed on different Edge computing terminals and the Cloud. Additionally, RESTful APIs have been developed to enable the vehicular network layer and the physical Edge layer to offload microservice-centric computation requests and retrieve the corresponding computational outcomes. The Entity framework is employed to ensure proper tracking and management of these requests. An HTML-based user interface has also been developed for a visual representation of the request pattern. Extensive testbed experiments reveal that the proposed system significantly optimizes bandwidth consumption, reduces latency, and increases the computed results delivery ratio when compared to conventional monolithic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many emerging smart applications rely on the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide solutions to time-critical problems. When building such applications, a software engineer must address multiple Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), including requirements for fast response time, low communication latency, high throughput, high energy efficiency, low operational cost and similar. Existing modern container-based software engineering approaches promise to improve the software lifecycle; however, they fail short of tools and mechanisms for NFRs management and optimisation. Our work addresses this problem with a new decision-making approach based on a Pareto Multi-Criteria optimisation. By using different instance configurations on various geo-locations, we demonstrate the suitability of our method, which narrows the search space to only optimal instances for the deployment of the containerised microservice.This solution is included in two advanced software engineering environments, the SWITCH workbench, which includes an Interactive Development Environment (IDE) and the ENTICE Virtual Machine and container images portal. The developed approach is particularly useful when building, deploying and orchestrating IoT applications across multiple computing tiers, from Edge-Cloudlet to Fog-Cloud data centres.

Cloud infrastructures are highly favoured as a computing delivery model worldwide, creating a strong societal dependence. It is therefore vital to enhance their resilience, providing persistent service delivery under a variety of conditions. Cloud environments are highly complex and continuously evolving. Additionally, the plethora of use-cases ensures requirements for persistent service delivery vary. As a contribution to knowledge, this work surveys resilience techniques for cloud environments. We apply a novel perspective using a layered model of traditional and emerging cloud paradigms. Works are then classified according to the Resilinets model. For each layer, the most common techniques with limitations are derived including an actor's strength in influencing resilience in the cloud with each technique.We conclude with some future challenges to the field of resilient cloud computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we design and implement a distributed Internet of Things (IoT) framework called IoT-guard, for an intelligent, resource-efficient, and real-time security management system. The system, consisting of edge-fog computational layers, will aid in crime prevention and predict crime events in a smart home environment (SHE). The IoT-guard will detect and confirm crime events in real-time, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and an event-driven approach to send crime data to protective services and police units enabling immediate action while conserving resources, such as energy, bandwidth (BW), and memory and Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage. In this study, we implement an IoT-guard laboratory testbed prototype and perform evaluations on its efficiency for real-time security application. The outcomes show better performance by the proposed system in terms of resource efficiency, agility, and scalability over the traditional IoT surveillance systems and state-of-the-art (SoA) approaches.

Fog computing extends multi-cloud computing by enabling services or application functions to be hosted close to their data sources. To take advantage of the capabilities of fog computing, serverless and the function-as-a-service (FaaS) software engineering paradigms allow for the flexible deployment of applications on multi-cloud, fog, and edge resources. This article reviews prominent fog computing frameworks and discusses some of the challenges and requirements of FaaS-enabled applications. Moreover, it proposes a novel framework able to dynamically manage multi-cloud, fog, and edge resources and to deploy data-intensive applications developed using the FaaS paradigm. The proposed framework leverages the FaaS paradigm in a way that improves the average service response time of data-intensive applications by a factor of three regardless of the underlying multi-cloud, fog, and edge resource infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) in Edge-to-Cloud computing is a complex task due to the great heterogeneity of computing infrastructures and networks and their varying runtime conditions, which influences the resulting Quality of Service (QoS). SLA-management should be supported by formal assurances, ranking and verification of various microservice deployment options. This work introduces a novel Smart Contract (SC) based architecture that provides for SLA management among relevant entities and actors in a decentralised computing environment: Virtual Machines (VMs), Cloud service consumers and Cloud providers. Its key components are especially designed SC functions, a trustless Smart Oracle (Chainlink) and a probabilistic Markov Decision Process. The novel architecture is implemented on Ethereum ledger (testnet). The results show its feasibility for SLA management including low costs operation within dynamic and decentralised Edge-to-Cloud federations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing demand for new mobile applications puts a heavy demand for more processing power and resources in smart mobile devices (SMD). Offloading is a promising solution for these issues which tries to move data, code, or computation from the SMDs to the remote or nearby resourceful servers. To increase the effectiveness of the offloading process and make better decisions, various stochastic offloading schemes are proposed in the literature which has adapted different stochastic models. Although offloading issues are vastly studied in the literature, there is a lack of comprehensive paper to focus on stochastic offloading solutions. This paper presents a meticulous review and classification of the stochastic offloading frameworks designed for different environments such as mobile cloud computing, mobile edge computing), and Fog computing. Following this, it first presents the required background concepts and key issues regarding the offloading problem and stochastic models. It then puts forward a taxonomy of the stochastic offloading approaches according to their applied stochastic models and highlights their architectures and contributions. In addition, in each category, a comparison of the stochastic offloading schemes is provided to illuminate their features. Finally, the concluding remarks and open research areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing advancements in sensor based smart devices allow monitoring the activities of preschoolers in classroom. The existing systems for monitoring the writing activity of preschoolers use the local processing and Cloud based solutions which require high processing time and seamless connectivity, respectively. Such systems are not feasible for low cost and low power smart devices. This work presents a writing activity monitoring system that monitors the gripping, holding, and orientation of the pencil and transfers the results to their parents and teachers. The system uses a layered computing infrastructure - Edge, Fog and Cloud layers, that allows energy consumption reduction and provides the solution closer to the user. Specially, the system selects the appropriate layers for processing and recognition of writing activities which provide the desired level of accuracy and prolongs the connectivity of the system. A prototype of the system is developed and examined on real user data to validate the accuracy and energy consumption of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are already transforming the way data are collected and processed in the data center, where some form of AI has permeated most areas of computing. The integration of AI algorithms at the edge is the next logical step which is already under investigation. However, harnessing such algorithms at the edge will require more computing power than what current platforms offer. In this paper, we present an FPGA system-on-chip-based architecture that supports the acceleration of ML algorithms in an edge environment. The system supports dynamic deployment of ML functions driven either locally or remotely, thus achieving a remarkable degree of flexibility. We demonstrate the efficacy of this architecture by executing a version of the well-known YOLO classifier which demonstrates competitive performance while requiring a reasonable amount of resources on the device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]