CHAPTER 3

IoT Processing Topologies

and Types
• Data Format
The Internet is a vast space where huge quantities and
varieties of data are generated regularly and flow freely.

• 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,
Figure 3.1 The various data generating and storage sources connected to the Internet and the plethora of data types contained within it
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.
Unstructured data
• In simple words, all 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.
 Importance of Processing in IoT

• The vast amount and types of data flowing through the Internet
necessitate the need for intelligent and resourceful processing
techniques.
• Given these urgencies, it is important to decide—when to process and
what to process? Before deciding upon the processing to pursue,
• We first divide the data to be processed into three types based on the
urgency of processing:
1) Very time critical,
2) time critical, and
3) normal
 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.
• we can divide the various processing solutions into two large
topologies:
1) On-site and
2) Off-site.
The off-site processing topology can be further divided into the following:
1) Remote processing and
2) 2) Collaborative processing.
 On-site processing
the on-site processing topology signifies that the data is processed at the source itself.

Figure 3.2 Event detection using an on-site processing topology

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.
Remote processing
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.
• Collaborative processing
This processing topology typically finds use in
scenarios with limited or no network connectivity,
especially systems lacking a backbone network.

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

Figure 3.4 Event detection using a collaborative processing topology
 IoT Device Design and Selection
Considerations
• Size: This is one of the crucial factors for deciding the
form factor and the energy consumption of a sensor
node.
• Energy: The energy requirements of a processor is the
most important deciding factor in designing IoT-based
sensing solutions.
• 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
• Memory: The memory requirements (both volatile and
non-volatile memory) of IoT devices determines the
capabilities the device can be armed with.
• Processing power: The processing power also decides
the type of applications the device can be associated
with.
• 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
 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.

• Starting from the primary layer of sensing, we can have multiple

sensing types tasked with detecting an environment (fire,
surveillance, and others).

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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
 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.
• Naive Approach: 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.
• 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.

• Learning based approach: Unlike the bargaining based

approaches, the learning based approaches generally rely
on past behavior and trends of data flow through the IoT
architecture.
 Offloading considerations

• Bandwidth: The maximum amount of data that can be

simultaneously transmitted over the network between
two points is the bandwidth 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).
• 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.
• Resources: It signifies the actual capabilities of an offload
location. These capabilities may be the processing power,
the suite of analytical algorithms, and others.
• 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.