A sustainable energy-aware resource management strategy for IoT Cloud federation

Abstract

The advent of both Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way to conceive distributed systems. Nowadays, we can talk about IoT Cloud to indicate a new type of distributed system consisting of a set of smart IoT devices or sensors interconnected with a remote Cloud infrastructure, platform, or software. Energy sustainability in IoT Cloud providers offers new tempting business opportunities for organizations, but at the same time it raises new challenges. In this paper, a flexible IoT Cloud federation energy management strategy is presented for optimizing the allocation of geographically localized smart sensors. We define the concept of IoT Cloud Federation as a mesh of IoT Cloud providers that are interconnected to provide a universal decentralized sensing and actuating environment where everything is driven by constraints and agreements in a ubiquitous infrastructure. In particular, a dynamic algorithm able to improve energy sustainability in a federated IoT Cloud ecosystem is discussed. In addition, we analyze a use-case driven strategy that allows both IoT Cloud providers and brokers to determine the paths to reach possible destination IoT devices in which computational resources should be dynamically migrated in order to push down the energy consumption due to IoT distributed applications.