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IOT PROCESSING TOPOLOGIES AND TYPES

Data Format
Introduction
The Internet is a vast space where huge quantities and varieties of data are generated regularly
and flow freely. As of January 2018, there are a reported 4.021 billion Internet users worldwide.
The massive volume of data generated by this huge number of users is further enhanced by the
multiple devices utilized by most users. In addition to these data-generating sources, non-
human data generation sources such as sensor nodes and automated monitoring systems further
add to the data load on the Internet. This huge data volume is composed of a variety of data
such as e-mails, text documents (Word docs, PDFs, and others), social media posts, videos,
audio files, and images, as shown in Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1 The various data generating and storage sources connected to the Internet and the
plethora of data types contained within it.
Data can be broadly grouped into two types based on how they can be accessed and stored.
1) Structured data.
2) Unstructured data.

Structured data
 These are typically text data that have a pre-defined structure.
 Structured data are associated with relational database management systems (RDBMS).
 These are primarily created by using length-limited data fields such as phone numbers,
social security numbers, and other such information.
 Even if the data is human or machine generated, these data are easily searchable by
querying algorithms as well as human generated queries.
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 Common usage of this type of data is associated with flight or train reservation systems,
banking systems, inventory controls, and other similar systems.
 Established languages such as Structured Query Language (SQL) are used for accessing
these data in RDBMS.
 However, in the context of IoT, structured data holds a minor share of the total
generated data over the Internet.

Unstructured data
 The data on the Internet, which is not structured, is categorized as unstructured.
 These data types have no pre-defined structure and can vary according to applications
and data-generating sources.
 Some of the common examples of human-generated unstructured data include text
e-mails, videos, images, phone recordings, chats, and others.
 Some common examples of machine-generated unstructured data include sensor data
from traffic, buildings, industries, satellite imagery, surveillance videos, and others.
 This data type does not have fixed formats associated with it.
 Which makes it very difficult for querying algorithms to perform a look-up.
 Querying languages such as NoSQL are generally used for this data type.

Importance of Processing in IoT

We first divide the data to be processed into three types based on the urgency of processing
1) Very time critical.
2) Time critical.
3) Normal.
1) Very time critical.
 Data from sources such as flight control systems, healthcare, and other such sources,
which need immediate decision support, are deemed as very critical.
 These data have a very low threshold of processing latency, typically in the range of a
few milliseconds.
 Considering the requirements of data processing, the processing requirements of data
from very time-critical sources are exceptionally high. Here, the need for processing
the data in place or almost nearer to the source is crucial in achieving the deployment
success of such domains.
2) Time critical.
 Data from sources that can tolerate normal processing latency are deemed as time
critical data.
 These data, generally associated with sources such as vehicles, traffic, machine
systems, smart home systems, surveillance systems, and others, which can tolerate a
latency of a few seconds fall in this category.
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 Similarly, considering the requirements of processing from category 2 data sources

(time-critical), the processing requirements allow for the transmission of data to be
processed to remote locations/processors such as clouds or through collaborative
processing.
3) Normal.
 Data from sources that can tolerate a processing latency of a few minutes to a few hours
and are typically associated with less data-sensitive domains.
 Such as agriculture, environmental monitoring, and others.
 Finally, the last category of data sources (normal) typically has no particular time
requirements for processing urgently and are pursued leisurely as such.

Processing Topologies
The identification and intelligent selection of processing requirement of an IoT application are
one of the crucial steps in deciding the architecture of the deployment.
A properly designed IoT architecture would result in massive savings in network bandwidth
and conserve significant amounts of overall energy in the architecture while providing the
proper and allowable processing latencies for the solutions associated with the architecture.

We can divide the various processing solutions into two large topologies:
1) On-site
2) Off-site

1) On-site processing
 The on-site processing topology signifies that the data is processed at the source itself.
 This is crucial in applications that have a very low tolerance for latencies.
 These latencies may result from the processing hardware or the network (during
transmission of the data for processing away from the processor).
 A dedicated and expensive on-site processing infrastructures are required.
 Applications such as those associated with healthcare and flight control systems (real
time systems).
 These additionally show rapid temporal changes that can be missed (leading to
catastrophic damages) unless the processing infrastructure is fast and robust enough to
handle such data.
 Figure 3.2 shows the on-site processing topology, where an event (here, fire) is
detected utilizing a temperature sensor connected to a sensor node. The sensor node
processes the information from the sensed event and generates an alert. The node
additionally has the option of forwarding the data to a remote infrastructure for further
analysis and storage.
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Figure 3.2 Event detection using an on-site processing topology

2) Off-site processing
 The off-site processing paradigm, as opposed to the on-site processing paradigms,
allows for latencies (due to processing or network latencies)
 It is significantly cheaper than on-site processing topologies.
 Cost is less. (Mainly due to the low demands and requirements of processing at the
source itself).
 The sensor nodes are not required to process data on an urgent basis.
 In the off-site processing topology, the sensor node is responsible for the collection and
framing of data that is eventually to be transmitted to another location for processing.
 Unlike the on-site processing topology, the off-site topology has a few dedicated high-
processing enabled devices, which can be borrowed by multiple simpler sensor nodes
to accomplish their tasks.
 At the same time, this arrangement keeps the costs of large-scale deployments
extremely manageable.
 In the off-site topology, the data from these sensor nodes (data generating sources) is
transmitted either to a remote location (which can either be a server or a cloud) or to
multiple processing nodes.
 Multiple nodes can come together to share their processing power in order to
collaboratively process the data (which is important in case a feasible communication
pathway or connection to a remote location cannot be established by a single node).
The off-site processing topology can be further divided into the following:
a) Remote processing
b) Collaborative processing.
Remote processing
 This is one of the most common processing topologies prevalent in present-day IoT
solutions.
 It encompasses sensing of data by various sensor nodes; the data is then forwarded to a
remote server or a cloud-based infrastructure for further processing and analytics.
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 The processing of data from hundreds and thousands of sensor nodes can be
simultaneously offloaded to a single, powerful computing platform.
 This results in massive cost and energy savings by enabling the reuse and reallocation
of the same processing resource while also enabling the deployment of smaller and
simpler processing nodes at the site of deployment.
 This setup also ensures massive scalability of solutions, without significantly affecting
the cost of the deployment.
 Figure 3.3 shows the outline of one such paradigm, where the sensing of an event is
performed locally, and the decision making is outsourced to a remote processor (here,
cloud).
 However, this paradigm tends to use up a lot of network bandwidth and relies heavily
on the presence of network connectivity between the sensor nodes and the remote
processing infrastructure.

Figure 3.3 Event detection using an off-site remote processing topology

Collaborative processing
 This processing topology typically finds use in scenarios with limited or no network
connectivity, especially systems lacking a backbone network.
 This topology can be quite economical for large-scale deployments spread over vast
areas, where providing networked access to a remote infrastructure is not viable.
 In such scenarios, the simplest solution is to club together the processing power of
nearby processing nodes and collaboratively process the data in the vicinity of the data
source itself.
 This approach also reduces latencies due to the transfer of data over the network.
 It conserves bandwidth of the network, especially ones connecting to the Internet.
 Figure 3.4 shows the collaborative processing topology for collaboratively processing
data locally.
 This topology can be quite beneficial for applications such as agriculture, where an
intense and temporally high frequency of data processing is not required as agricultural
data is generally logged after significantly long intervals (in the range of hours).
 One important point to mention about this topology is the preference of mesh networks
for easy implementation of this topology.
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Figure 3.4 Event detection using a collaborative processing topology

IoT Device Design and Selection Considerations

The main consideration of minutely defining an IoT solution is the selection of the processor
for developing the sensing solution (i.e., the sensor node). This selection is governed by many
parameters that affect the usability, design, and affordability of the designed IoT sensing and
processing solution.
In this chapter, we mainly focus on the deciding factors for selecting a processor for the design
of a sensor node. The main factor governing the IoT device design and selection for various
applications is the processor. However, the other important considerations are as follows.
1) Size
 This is one of the crucial factors for deciding the form factor and the energy
consumption of a sensor node.
 It has been observed that larger the form factor, larger is the energy consumption of
the hardware.
 Additionally, large form factors are not suitable for a significant bulk of IoT
applications, which rely on minimal form factor solutions (e.g., wearables).
2) Energy
 The energy requirements of a processor are the most important deciding factor in
designing IoT-based sensing solutions.
 Higher the energy requirements, higher is the energy source (battery) replacement
frequency.
 This principle automatically lowers the long-term sustainability of sensing hardware,
especially for IoT-based applications.
3) Cost
 The cost of a processor, besides the cost of sensors, is the driving force in deciding the
density of deployment of sensor nodes for IoT-based solutions.
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 Cheaper cost of the hardware enables a much higher density of hardware deployment
by users of an IoT solution.
 For example, cheaper gas and fire detection solutions would enable users to include
much more sensing hardware for a lesser cost. •
4)Memory
 The memory requirements (both volatile and non-volatile memory) of IoT devices
determines the capabilities the device can be armed with.
 Features such as local data processing, data storage, data filtering, data formatting,
and a host of other features rely heavily on the memory capabilities of devices.
 However, devices with higher memory tend to be costlier for obvious reasons.
5)Processing power
 As covered in earlier sections, processing power is vital (comparable to memory) in
deciding what type of sensors can be accommodated with the IoT device/node, and
what processing features can integrate on-site with the IoT device.
 The processing power also decides the type of applications the device can be
associated with.
 Typically, applications that handle video and image data require IoT devices with
higher processing power as compared to applications requiring simple sensing of the
environment.
6)I/O rating
 The input–output (I/O) rating of IoT device, primarily the processor, is the deciding
factor in determining the circuit complexity, energy usage, and requirements for support
of various sensing solutions and sensor types.
 Newer processors have a meager I/O voltage rating of 3.3 V, as compared to 5 V for
the somewhat older processors.
 This translates to requiring additional voltage and logic conversion circuitry to interface
legacy technologies and sensors with the newer processors.
 Despite low power consumption due to reduced I/O voltage levels, this additional
voltage and circuitry not only affects the complexity of the circuits but also affects the
costs.
7)Add-ons
 The support of various add-ons a processor or for that matter, an IoT device provides,
such as analog to digital conversion (ADC) units, in-built clock circuits, connections to
USB and ethernet, inbuilt wireless access capabilities, and others helps in defining the
robustness and usability of a processor or IoT device in various application scenarios.
 Additionally, the provision for these add-ons also decides how fast a solution can be
developed, especially the hardware part of the whole IoT application.
 As interfacing and integration of systems at the circuit level can be daunting to the
uninitiated, the prior presence of these options with the processor makes the processor
or device highly lucrative to the users/ developers.
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Processing Offloading
The processing offloading paradigm is important for the development of densely deployable,
energy-conserving, miniaturized, and cheap IoT-based solutions for sensing tasks. Building
upon the basics of the off-site processing topology covered in the previous sections in this
chapter, we delve a bit further into the various nuances of processing offloading in IoT.
Figure 3.5 shows the typical outline of an IoT deployment with the various layers of processing
that are encountered spanning vastly different application domains—from as near as sensing
the environment to as far as cloud-based infrastructure.

Figure 3.5 The various data generating and storage sources connected to the Internet and the
plethora of data types contained within it

Starting from the primary layer of sensing, we can have multiple sensing types tasked with
detecting an environment (fire, surveillance, and others). The sensors enabling these sensing
types are integrated with a processor using wired or wireless connections (mostly, wired).
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In the event that certain applications require immediate processing of the sensed data, an on-
site processing topology is followed, similar to the one in Figure 3.2. However, for the majority
of IoT applications, the bulk of the processing is carried out remotely in order to keep the on-
site devices simple, small, and economical. Typically, for off-site processing, data from the
sensing layer can be forwarded to the fog or cloud or can be contained within the edge layer.
The edge layer makes use of devices within the local network to process data that which is
similar to the collaborative processing topology shown in Figure 3.4.
The devices within the local network, till the fog, generally communicate using short-range
wireless connections. In case the data needs to be sent further up the chain to the cloud, long-
range wireless connection enabling access to a backbone network is essential. Fog-based
processing is still considered local because the fog nodes are typically localized within a
geographic area and serve the IoT nodes within a much smaller coverage area as compared to
the cloud. Fog nodes, which are at the level of gateways, may or may not be accessed by the
IoT devices through the Internet.
Finally, the approach of forwarding data to a cloud or a remote server, as shown in the topology
in Figure 3.3, requires the devices to be connected to the Internet through long-range
wireless/wired networks, which eventually connect to a backbone network. This approach is
generally costly concerning network bandwidth, latency, as well as the complexity of the
devices and the network infrastructure involved.
This section on data offloading is divided into three parts:
1) Offload location (which outlines where all the processing can be offloaded in the IoT
architecture).
2) Offload decision making (how to choose where to offload the processing to and by how
much).
3) Offloading considerations (deciding when to offload).
1) Offload location
The choice of offload location decides the applicability, cost, and sustainability of the IoT
application and deployment.
We distinguish the offload location into four types:
1)Edge
 Offloading processing to the edge implies that the data processing is facilitated to a
location at or near the source of data generation itself.
 Offloading to the edge is done to achieve aggregation, manipulation, bandwidth
reduction, and other data operations directly on an IoT device.
2)Fog
 Fog computing is a decentralized computing infrastructure that is utilized to conserve
network bandwidth, reduce latencies, restrict the amount of data unnecessarily flowing
through the Internet, and enable rapid mobility support for IoT devices.
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 The data, computing, storage and applications are shifted to a place between the data
source and the cloud resulting in significantly reduced latencies and network bandwidth
usage.
3) Remote Server
 A simple remote server with good processing power may be used with IoT-based
applications to offload the processing from resource constrained IoT devices.
 Rapid scalability may be an issue with remote servers, and they may be costlier and
hard to maintain in comparison to solutions such as the cloud.
4) Cloud
 Cloud computing is a configurable computer system, which can get access to
configurable resources, platforms, and high-level services through a shared pool hosted
remotely.
 A cloud is provisioned for processing offloading so that processing resources can be
rapidly provisioned with minimal effort over the Internet, which can be accessed
globally.
 Cloud enables massive scalability of solutions as they can enable resource
enhancement allocated to a user or solution in an on-demand manner, without the user
having to go through the pains of acquiring and configuring new and costly hardware.
2)Offload decision making
The choice of where to offload and how much to offload is one of the major deciding factors
in the deployment of an offsite-processing topology-based IoT deployment architecture. The
decision making is generally addressed considering data generation rate, network bandwidth,
the criticality of applications, processing resource available at the offload site, and other
factors.
Some of these approaches are as follows.
Naive Approach
 This approach is typically a hard approach, without too much decision making.
 It can be considered as a rule-based approach in which the data from IoT devices are
offloaded to the nearest location based on the achievement of certain offload criteria.
 Although easy to implement, this approach is never recommended, especially for dense
deployments, or deployments where the data generation rate is high or the data being
offloaded in complex to handle (multimedia or hybrid data types).
 Generally, statistical measures are consulted for generating the rules for offload
decision making.
Bargaining based approach
 This approach, although a bit processing-intensive during the decision-making stages,
enables the alleviation of network traffic congestion, enhances service QoS (quality of
service) parameters such as bandwidth, latencies, and others.
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 At times, while trying to maximize multiple parameters for the whole IoT
implementation, in order to provide the most optimal solution or QoS, not all
parameters can be treated with equal importance.
 Bargaining based solutions try to maximize the QoS by trying to reach a point where
the qualities of certain parameters are reduced, while the others are enhanced.
 This measure is undertaken so that the achieved QoS is collaboratively better for the
full implementation rather than a select few devices enjoying very high QoS.
 Game theory is a common example of the bargaining based approach. This approach
does not need to depend on historical data for decision making purposes.
Learning based approach
 Unlike the bargaining based approaches, the learning based approaches generally rely
on past behaviour and trends of data flow through the IoT architecture.
 The optimization of QoS parameters is pursued by learning from historical trends and
trying to optimize previous solutions further and enhance the collective behaviour of
the IoT implementation.
 The memory requirements and processing requirements are high during the decision
making stages.
 The most common example of a learning based approach is machine learning.
3)Offloading considerations
There are a few offloading parameters which need to be considered while deciding upon the
offloading type to choose. These considerations typically arise from the nature of the IoT
application and the hardware being used to interact with the application.
Some of these parameters are as follows.
•Bandwidth
 The maximum amount of data that can be simultaneously transmitted over the network
between two points is the bandwidth of that network.
 The bandwidth of a wired or wireless network is also considered to be its data-carrying
capacity and often used to describe the data rate of that network.
• Latency
 It is the time delay incurred between the start and completion of an operation.
 In the present context, latency can be due to the network (network latency) or the
processor (processing latency).
 In either case, latency arises due to the physical limitations of the infrastructure, which
is associated with an operation.
 The operation can be data transfer over a network or processing of a data at a processor.
• Criticality
 It defines the importance of a task being pursued by an IoT application.
 The more critical a task is, the lesser latency is expected from the IoT solution.
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 For example, detection of fires using an IoT solution has higher criticality than
detection of agricultural field parameters. The former requires a response time in the
tune of milliseconds, whereas the latter can be addressed within hours or even days.
•Resources
 It signifies the actual capabilities of an offload location.
 These capabilities may be the processing power, the suite of analytical algorithms, and
others.
 For example, it is futile and wasteful to allocate processing resources reserved for real-
time multimedia processing (which are highly energy-intensive and can process and
analyze huge volumes of data in a short duration) to scalar data (which can be
addressed using nominal resources without wasting much energy).
• Data volume
 The amount of data generated by a source or sources that can be simultaneously handled
by the offload location is referred to as its data volume handling capacity.
 Typically, for large and dense IoT deployments, the offload location should be robust
enough to address the processing issues related to massive data volumes.