Towards Cloud of Things from Internet of Things

Abstract

The techniques Internet of things (IoT) and Cloud Computing (CC) are becoming a part of our day-to-day life; where IoT connects a billion numbers of devices to share the information by communicating each other and CC grants convenient, on-demand scalable network access in order to utilize the computing resources and it facilitates dynamic data integration from diverse sources. Both techniques are having their own pros and cons. So, a novel paradigm called cloud of things (CoT) is modeled by integrating the both CC and IoT, which enables a large number of applications to get advantages of IoT as well as CC. This paper delivers the basics of the technologies, motivations to model the cloud of things and its benefits. Also, it discusses the implementation challenges.

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International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (4.6) (2018) 112-116
International Journal of Engineering & Technology
Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET
Research paper
Towards Cloud of Things from Internet of Things
D. Vaishnavi1*, Shawon Rahman2, D. Ramalingam3
1Dept. of CSE, Vardhaman College of Engg., Hyderabad, Telangana, India
2Dept. of CSE, University of Hawaiʻi, Hilo, USA
3Faculty of IT, Majan College, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman
*Corresponding author E-mail:vaishume11@gmail.com,
Abstract
The techniques Internet of things (IoT) and Cloud Computing (CC) are becoming a part of our day-to-day life; where IoT connects a
billion numbers of devices to share the information by communicating each other and CC grants convenient, on-demand scalable net-
work access in order to utilize the computing resources and it facilitates dynamic data integration from diverse sources. Both techniques
are having their own pros and cons. So, a novel paradigm called cloud of things (CoT) is modeled by integrating the both CC and IoT,
which enables a large number of applications to get advantages of IoT as well as CC. This paper delivers the basics of the technologies,
motivations to model the cloud of things and its benefits. Also, it discusses the implementation challenges.
Keywords: Cloud computing; Internet of Things; cloud of things; security; challenges.
1. Introduction
Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic and wide-ranging network
infrastructure of interconnected self-configuring nodes. It is fun-
damentally regarded as widely distributed, real world small things
and it has limited storage and processing capacity to attain per-
formance, security, reliability and privacy. In contrast, Cloud
computing has almost boundless of storage and processing capaci-
ty, is an advanced technology and it has greater number of IoT
problems at least partially elucidated [1], [2]. Accordingly, a new
paradigm is innovated to heighten the both recent and future net-
work development, is the integration of cloud and IoT, called
Cloud of Things (CoT). This integrated technology carries the
following characteristics:
On-market self-services: The services related to cloud always
depend on the web and realizes the information deprived of any
special benefits from society.
Wide range of network access: It provides diverse connectivity
alternatives. The resources required for cloud can be collected via
a wide range of network connected devices such as laptops, tablets
and mobile phones.
Resource polling: It represents the way, how the information can
be shared with the user at anywhere and anytime by means of the
needed authorizations for gaining the access.
Elasticity: It describes about adding or removing the users, editing
the software setup simply and quickly, networking and also deliv-
ers about the increasing storage space.
Measured service: It calculates the data usage like bandwidth,
data storage and active user accounts in cloud space.
Fig. 1. Definition of IoT
2. Basic concepts
This section discusses basic concepts of Internet of Things and
cloud computing along with its advantages and drawbacks, it de-
livers.
2.1. Internet of Things
IoT has been popularized since the last few years, and which re-
fers to a world-wide network of uniquely addressable intercon-
nected things/devices; identification of devices is based on the
standard communication internet protocols [3], [4]. The key
thought behind the IoT is, the people able to measure, understand,
infer and even is able to modify the environmental things what are
all ubiquitously presented around them as shown in Fig.1.

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113
IoT is operated by the advanced communication technologies and
variety of devices, rather things incorporated in IoT are not only
complex devices like mobile phones, instead it also includes day-
to-day objects like clothing, furniture, landmarks, paper, monu-
ments, work of art, etc [5], [6]. These things act as actuators or
sensors, which are able to work together with each other to ac-
complish a goal.
The main feature of IoT is its influence on daily life of users [7]. It
has incredible effects in home scenarios as well as work scenarios
such as assisted living, e-health, and smart transportation etc. A
few key aspects of IoT are described below:
RFID: Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) system is main
component in any IoT model, which incorporates one or more
readers and several tags. It helps in automatic identification of
anything they are attached to and allow objects to be assigned
unique digital identities, to communicate with digital services.
RFID tags don’t require on-board power supply, but it consumes
power from batteries [7], [8].
Sensor Networks (wireless): It contains a huge number of sens-
ing nodes, and their communication takes place in multi-hop fash-
ion. Special nodes called sinks are used to collect the results.
Wireless sensor networks (WSN), provides various data that are
being utilized in government and environmental services, defense
and healthcare etc. It also may face many issues like security,
reliability, privacy, storage capacity, bandwidth etc [7], [9].
Addressing: The evolution of internet led the people to intercon-
nect unprecedentedly, but now the trend is to interconnect the
object to make to the environment as smart [10]. In this regard,
things or objects needs to be uniquely identified, this unique iden-
tification can be addressed by IPv4 and IPv6.
Middleware: Since the limited storage and processing capabilities,
the participation of objects in the network is heterogeneous. So,
the middleware plays a key role between the things and the appli-
cation layer, in order to provide the functional abstraction. The
middleware consists a set of object abstraction service manage-
ment, service composition and application layers as shown in the
Fig. 2 [5].
Fig. 2: Middleware architecture of IoT
2.2. Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a disruptive technology with insightful impli-
cations to bring the various internet services. Large companies like
google, amazon, facebook, etc. widely took this paradigm for
delivering services via the internet, also gaining both technical and
economical benefits. Even though some of issues have been found
in each service models, those are associated to security, privacy
and service-level agreements, which might be an alarming issues
of potential users [11]. Also, the lack of standard APIs prevents
the customers to simply fetch the code and data from a site in
order to run in another. Fig. 3 précises the cloud service models
and its benefits by means of layered architecture fashion.
Fig. 3: Cloud computing: layered view
The architecture of cloud contains four layers; they are data centre
(hardware), infrastructure, platform and application [12], [13].
Cloud services are divided as follows:
Software as a Service (Saas): It denotes the functioning of appli-
cations over the cloud.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): It denotes platform layer resources.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): It refers the resources such as
network, storage and processing. It permits the consumer to gov-
ern the storage, operating system and applications.
Types of Clouds: As stated in the literature, cloud can be various
types. They are:
(i) Private: It is used typically owned, operated a managed
by sing organization.
(ii) Public: It is provisioned to custom usage by the public.
(iii) Hybrid: It is a combination of more than one distinct
cloud structure.
(iv) Virtual Private: It aims to addressing the issues related
to public and private clouds. It permits the owners
to format the network settings by their own.
As each type of cloud has its own pros and cons, selection of the
cloud model is based on the required business consequence. CC is
attractive, as it free for the infrastructure invest, renting resources
along with needs and usage. It permits to decrease operating cost
and their load. Moreover, it has a number of benefits in terms of
energy efficiency, resource utilization, elasticity, flexibility and
performance isolation.

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International Journal of Engineering & Technology
3. Cloud of Things (CoT)
The two technologies IoT and Cloud have got a lot of advance-
ments [11]. It has unique characteristics, as Table 1 depicts. Such
dissimilarities has induced the researchers to put forward a novel
technology; an integration of cloud and IoT called Cloud of
Things (CoT).
Table 1 Different aspects of Cloud and IoT
Various aspects
Cloud
IoT
Reachability
Centralized
Universal
Displacement
Ubiquitous
Restricted
Components
Virtual resources
Real-world
Computations
Virtual and unrestricted
Restricted
Role of the internet
Delivery service
Point of coverage
Storage
Virtual and unrestricted
Restricted
Big data
Manages
Storage
Typically, IoT can improve their technological constraints (pro-
cessing, communication, storage) from the virtual unlimited capa-
bilities and resources of cloud, whereas, cloud can extend its scope
by dealing with real world things in a more dynamic and distribut-
ed routine. Also, it can delivery new services of the everyday life
developments. In most of the application cloud acts as intermedi-
ate layer in the middle of the applications and the things, for hid-
ing all the complexity and functionalities require to implement it.
This will influence the upcoming development, where information
gathering, dispensation and transmission may cause new meets
[14]. Even though IoT characterized by a very high heterogeneity
of devices, protocols and technologies, it lacks in various essential
properties, reliability, scalability, efficiency, security, interopera-
bility and flexibility [15], [16]. Cloud simplifies IoT data collec-
tion and processing, also empowers quick setup and amalgamation
of new things at lower costs for devolvement and data processing
[15]. The other advantages of CoT are follows:
Communication: Sharing of data and application are the main
aspects of CoT paradigm. Ubiquitous applications can be transfer
via IoT, where data collection and distribution by the automation
can be done at low-cost. Cloud facilitates an effective solution to
establish a connection, tracking and managing any things from
anywhere at any time using built-in apps and customized portals
[17], [18].
Storage: IoT involves in a large volume of information bases,
which in turn generates a plethora of semi or non-structured data
called big data [14]. Big data have the following characteristics
[16]: data size, type and velocity. Data generated by the IoT is
handled by the cloud as it is more flexible and also cost effective
[17].
Processing computations: IoT has restricted processing and en-
ergy resources, whereas cloud facilitates virtual unlimited pro-
cessing and on-demand utilities[19].
Scope: As billions of users communicating with each other’s and
accumulating a variety of information, we can say that the world is
rapidly moving in the direction of Internet of Everything (IoE)
arena- a network of networks unprecedented opportunities and
also new risks. CoT paradigm facilitates to the new smart services
and extends the cloud applications via the things [2], [17], also
giving introduction to the Things as a Service paradigm [20], [21].
New meets: CoT empowers new developments for smart applica-
tions, objects and services[9], [15], [22] Some of the new meets
are following:
 SaaS (Sensing as a Service): It deals with sensor data
 EaaS (Ethernet as a Service): It provides connectivity to
handle remote objects/ devices
 SAaaS (Sensing and Actuation as a Service): It gives au-
tomatic control logics
 IPMaaS (Identity and Policy Management as a Service):
It deals with identity management and policies.
 DBaaS (Database as a Service): It manages the data-
bases.
 SEaaS (Sensor Event as a Service): It dispatches the
sensor event messages
 SenaaS (Sensor as a Service): It manages the remote
sensors
 DaaS (Data as a Service): It facilitates the access to any
kind of data.
4. CoT Applications
The integration of cloud and IoT (CoT) has given a birth to a new
set of smart applications and services and it can impact our every-
day life as shown in Fig. 4.

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115
Fig. 4: Applications of CoT [11]
Table 2: Applications of CoT
Application
Description
Smart city
The generation of smart city services enables the
interaction of surrounding environment and it
creates new opportunities for contextualization
and geo-awareness.
Healthcare
It brings many innovative services like collect-
ing patients’ data from medical devices of net-
work connected sensors, storing and processing
of those data in cloud as Electronic healthcare
records. (intelligent medicine control and hospi-
tal management, smart wearables for health
monitoring)
Smart home
It adopts various embedded devices and cloud
services to bring out the automated home appli-
cations like security control, smart metering.
Video surveillance
Complex video analytics need cloud solutions
(VSaaS) for video storage and processing [23].
Automotive and mo-
bility
It brings many benefits like increasing road
safety, managing traffic and parking, reducing
road congestion, vehicle warranty analysis [24].
Smart grid and energy
It enables consumer with smart management of
energy consumption (renewable energy re-
sources)
Smart logistics
It makes easy of goods transition from producer
and consumer by enabling tracking the transits
of goods.
Environmental moni-
toring
It enables the entity that monitors the wide area
of environment and sensors like pollution source
monitoring, air quality monitoring and water
quality monitoring.
5. Challenges
The previous section discussed the benefits and improvement in
applications conquered by the integrated technology CoT. This
section discusses the challenges behind the improvement of appli-
cation scenarios [14]. Those challenges are elaborated below:
Privacy and security:
When some of IoT applications upgrade with cloud, issues arise
because of the discrepancy in the knowledge about physical loca-
tion of data, trustiness in service provider, and knowledge of ser-
vice level agreements [25]. Such applications may undergo to the
attacks namely SQL injection, session riding, cross site scripting
and side-channel and also it may affect by the vulnerabilities such
as virtual machine escape and session hijacking. The computing
power constraints imposed by the things do not allow employing
the public key cryptography also.
Heterogeneity:
The important and non-negligible challenge is heterogeneity of
platforms, devices, operating systems and services. The interaction
with huge amount of heterogeneous things has to be properly iden-
tified in the cloud among the various levels. This challenge com-
prises the aspects in terms of interoperable programming interfac-
es [26], unifying platforms and middleware, and copying with data
diversity [25], etc.
Performance:
The main challenge is obtaining a stable network performance.
For instance, if the broadband increases, it is not easy to follow the
storage and computation [13], [17]. As timeliness is heavily im-
pacted with unpredictability issues, real-world applications might
be affect extensively.
Reliability:
When CoT is implemented for mission-critical applications, relia-
bility issues usually rises. For example, vehicular networking and
communication is unreliable [27].
Big data:
The integration of cloud and IoT clearly states that IoT will be a
one of the source of data (big data) and the cloud can facilitate to
store that data for a long period of time [10]. Handling such a
large volume of data is an issue, as the performance of application
is heavily subject to the properties of data management service.
Defining a solution for resolving the data management issues is
still a big challenge [19]. Moreover, data integrity is a significant
issue, due to service quality, security and privacy challenges [28].
Legal aspects: It is very important in certain research applica-
tions. For example, service provider should adopt for international
regulations and users should offer certain donation to data collec-
tion [29].
Monitoring: It is an essential task in cloud for dealing resources,
planning the capacity, performance and security and troubleshoot-

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International Journal of Engineering & Technology
ing also [30]. CoT take over the monitoring task from cloud, but it
may get affect by volume and velocity features of IoT.
Large scale: CoT can design the new applications by analyzing
and integrating information spreading out from devices like sen-
sors [31–33]. Some applications internally require the interaction
with a large number of devices like distributed area environments.
This large scale of systems makes the usual challenges harder to
overwhelm.
6. Conclusion
This paper presented the applications and challenges of integrated
technology, cloud of things (CoT). First, it discussed the basics of
IoT and cloud computing along with its pros and cons. Also, it
described the thing that strived to integrate technologies. CoT
paradigm will be enhanced for every applications and services too.
It can promote improved healthcare and smart city applications,
business openings, etc. The challenges like scalability and security;
the heterogeneity of devices and technologies; legal aspects and
privacy preservation behind CoT is also discussed. The future
research direction of this integrated technology may include the
large support in communication models, security related software
like firewalls, intrusion detection, surveillance, identification of
managing the naming and addressing the things.
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