Secure hierarchical fog computing-based architecture for industry 5.0 using an attribute-based encryption scheme

Abstract

Industry 5.0 is an emerging phase in the industrial field where humans and the latest technologies work together to bring revolutionary changes to work processes. It is the future of the upcoming generation for smart city development. Operations and designing of smart systems for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices include various types of decision-making at different levels of domains. Highly complex systems have a huge number of variables and decision-making requirements which also needs real-time data gathering from IIoT devices. Fog computing performs a key role by locating IIoT devices close to its proximity and reducing the processing time in comparison to cloud computing for smart systems. It makes smart systems work in a secure, flexible and time-sensitive manner. The presence of sensors makes data-intensive analysis challenging in these systems but fog computing handles it all. Along with other challenges, security is also one of the concerns that can affect the overall system if compromised. The main objective of this article is to introduce hierarchical fog computing-based architecture for smart energy-supplying systems as a part of Industry 5.0. This architecture will be able to support a large number of infrastructural components and provide services efficiently. In this article, validation of the amount of data transmitted by IIoT devices to the cloud per second is done for three different cases: 1. The proposed four-layer fog computing architecture, 2. Fog architecture with only layer three layers with the rest of the computing on the cloud, 3. A traditional system with cloud computing. The proposed approach is validated over state of art approaches in terms of accuracy. Moreover, the security of the architecture is provided using the Attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme, which ensures data confidentiality with minimum overhead.