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Top1. Introduction
The internet has revolutionized the computers, communication and communication technology like nothing has ever before. The internet’s invention is one of mankind's most cherished accomplishments. Yet, the seepage of its use and adaptation of technology is changing its terrain rapidly. The specter of new technologies coming together and linking with each other faster has created new paradigms like Cyber-Physical System (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT). What is unimaginable is the wireless connection of devices to our physical bodies, to each other and absolutely everything around us at any time (Atzori, Iera, & Morabito, 2010; Ning et al. 2016). Thus, IoT implies an expansion of Internet through which physical objects are connected virtually, with the ability to provide smart services to its users.
Naturally, this interaction between devices is slated to create gargantuan amounts and diversities of information and data. It is interesting to consider some figures. Cisco predicts that by 2020 some 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet, and the data and information generated by devices, people, things, appliances etc. will amount to 500 zettabytes. And by 2019, out of this, 45 percent of data generated by IoT will be interpreted, processed, analysed and saved at the network’s edge (Evans, 2011; Cisco global cloud index: Forecast and methodology, 2016).
Along with the mushrooming of data, the pace of data creation is fast increasing, too. For instance, findings related to healthcare services show that 30 million users create about 25,000 tuples data per second (Cortes, Bonnaire, Marin, & Sens, 2015) with respect to healthcare-linked IoT communication. This means the data storage and processing mechanisms that we have in place at present are unable to keep up with what is expected (He et al., 2017). And traditional computing versions, like distributed computing etc. are failing to handle this deluge.
But the advent of cloud computing has emphatically altered the scenario of information technology. By getting rid of such factors like proportional expenses, scalability, getting rid of upfront IT investment etc., it has brought in substantial advantages for IT users (Ghahramani, Zhou, & Hon, 2017; Xia, Zhou, Luo, & Zhu, 2015; Yuan et al., 2017; Zhang & Zhou, 2018; Zheng et al., 2017).
Thus, owing to its potent computational power and capacity to store (Aembrust et al., 2010; Fernando, Loke, & Rahayu, 2013), cloud computing emerged as an effective method for data processing. At the same time, though, there are some inherent issues with cloud computing. For one, cloud computing is a consolidated, centralized computing representation that performs computations in the cloud. This means that all the data, information, requests and what have you have to be dispatched to the cloud. And while the pace of processing of data has increased swiftly, the bandwidth of network has not kept equal pace.