Uploading and Replicating Internet of Things (IoT) Data on Distributed Cloud Storage

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon is creating a world of billions of connected devices generating enormous amounts of data items. In particular, for purposes of high availability and disaster recovery, replication of this data on cloud storage needs to be implemented efficiently. To that end, in this paper, we investigate the combined problem of uploading IoT data from a set of sensor gateways and efficient replication of this data on distributed cloud storage. While other efforts do exist in this space, either they do not consider replication in context of small size and high number of data items, which is inherent nature of IoT data or they concentrate on the access time after replication. Our solution assumes the existence of multiple distributed cloud data centers, called mini-Clouds, among which data can be replicated. We model our problem comprehensively based on various parameters such as effective bandwidth of the IoT network, available number and size of data items at each mini-Cloud, and we present our problem as a collection of various sub-problems based on subsets of these parameters. We prove that the exact solution to the problem is intractable, and we present a number of heuristic strategies to solve it. Our results show that the performance of any heuristic is bounded by the read and write latency of mini-Clouds and the best we can do is often 12 times the worst we can do for a given number of data items to be uploaded and replicated from the gateways to the mini-Clouds in test setup.