Internet of things witnessed rapid growth in the last decade and is considered to be a promising field that plays an all-important role in every aspect of modern-day life. However, the growth of IoT is seriously hindered by factors like limited storage, communication capabilities, and computational power. On the other hand, cloud has the potential to support a large amount of data as it has massive storage capacity and can perform complex computations. Considering the tremendous potential of these two technologies and the manner in which they complement one another, they have been integrated to form what is commonly referred to as the cloud of things (CoT). This integration is beneficial as the resulting system is more robust, intelligent, powerful, and offers promising solutions to the users. However, the new paradigm (CoT) is faced with a significant number of challenges that need to be addressed. This chapter discusses in detail various challenges like reliability, latency, scalability, heterogeneity, power consumption, standardization, etc. faced by the cloud of things.
TopIntroduction
Internet of things (Ashton, 2011) has emerged as one of the rapidly growing paradigms that have revolutionalized the world of technology. IoT is primarily a sensor-based technology that works on the principle of establishing communication and interaction between heterogeneous smart objects that work together to achieve a common goal. According to Gartner, 20.4 billion devices will be linked through IoT by 2020 (van, 2017). A vast amount of information is generated through IoT; hence, there is a need to develop a mechanism that could store this information. Clouds are of paramount importance when it comes to storing a gigantic amount of data, and as such, it is a natural option to store the massive amount of data generated in IoT. Cloud provides a common platform for users to analyze, manage, and store the information. The primary characteristics of the Cloud include elasticity, multi-tenancy, scalability, and adaptability. Since these two technologies balance each other, researchers (Alhakbani et al., 2014; Gomes et al., 2014) have proposed their integration; as such, the resulting system is more agile, ubiquitous, and flexible as it could respond to the events in real-time from anywhere. The Cloud of things (CoT) is a novel paradigm that came into being by combining Cloud and IoT technologies, and Andriod Things (earlier known as Google Brillo) & Microsoft Azure IoT Suit are two known examples of the Cloud-IoT integrated platform. The dynamic nature of IoT can provide services in real-time to the Cloud users, and simultaneously, the latter can be used to integrate and process the huge data generated by the connected devices. Moreover, using these technologies in combination is beneficial as the loopholes of one technique can be filled by the other. However, as many IoT devices are concurrently connected to the Cloud platform in CoT, forming a massive network due to which several challenges such as reliability, latency, scalability, heterogeneity, power consumption, standardization are faced. Besides, security is a significant concern in the Cloud-IoT paradigm that can pose a severe threat to the sensitive information stored on Cloud and thus, hamper user privacy. The significant issues that are caused due to different due to application framework of CoT are listed in figure 1.
Figure 1. Challenges in Cloud-IoT integration
Although many solutions have been proposed to tackle these problems, yet an effective solution to addresses these issues remains an open challenge. The full potential of these two technologies can be harnessed when these issues are resolved so that uninterrupted and better services can be offered to the users. Some of the challenges of the Cloud-IoT paradigm have been discussed below.
TopChallenges In Cloud-Iot Paradigm
Security and Trust
Since a colossal amount of data is generated and stored at one place on Cloud-IoT, it is more vulnerable to attackers, and hence can unfavorably influence the security of the system. In recent times various measures (Abrar et al., 2020; Bamhdi et al., 2021) have been taken into consideration in order to tackle these issues. In a Cloud-IoT paradigm, as the information captured by the IoT node is forwarded to the Cloud, there is a high risk involved as the information might be leaked because of the multi-user characteristic of the Cloud. Further, the wireless nature of IoT makes them more vulnerable to attacks (Masoodi et al., 2019), wherein the attackers intercept the transmission taking place within IoT devices and the corresponding Cloud platform, thereby affecting the reliability of the system. Moreover, new security challenges, like Side-channel attacks, Session hijacks, SQL injection, Session riding, cross-site scripting, and virtual machine escape, need to be addressed to ensure that the system is secure (Botta et al., 2016).