Decentralized ME-Centric Framework—A Futuristic Architecture for Consumer IoT

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) landscape is synergistic with various participating domains like smart healthcare, Industrial IoT, and smart cities. The Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) landscape with its massive potential occupies a sizable chunk of the future internet and is still immature due to its lack of interoperability and data sustainability among IoT applications. Most of the existing CIoT deployments are vertical solutions comprising CIoT devices, gateways, centralized cloud services, resulting in fragmented silos of data. To overcome the integration issues and provide a global ecosystem for CIoT applications, we need a contemporary, decentralized, semantic, data-centric, and interoperable approach. To enhance seamless integration among the user and CIoT applications, a holistic approach that is flexible, robust with reliable performance is indispensable. In this article, we introduce a futuristic decentralized MECentric state-of-the-art architecture for CIoT that can overcome the challenges of and enhance the agility, scalability, resiliency, and security of CIoT systems. In a decentralized ME-Centric prototype, we integrate edge computing with decentralized storage solutions and new cutting technologies like digital twins, and blockchain with semantic ontologies to design a comprehensive beneficial outlook for consumers.