Module-3

IoT Processing Topologies & Types

Presentation By
Manjunatha Y
Assistant Professor
GMIT Davangere
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Data Format:
• The Internet is a vast space where huge quantities and varieties of data are generated
regularly and flow freely.
• As of January 2018, there are a reported 4.021 billion Internet users worldwide.
• The massive volume of data generated by this huge number of users is further enhanced by
the multiple devices utilized by most users.
• 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, as
shown in Figure 1.
• These data can be broadly grouped into two types based on how they can be accessed and
stored:
1) Structured data and
2) Unstructured data.

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Figure.1 The various data generating and storage sources connected to the Internet and the very large
amount of data types contained within it.
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1.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.
• Even if the data is human or machine generated, these data are easily searchable
by querying algorithms as well as human generated queries.
• Common usage of this type of data is associated with flight or train reservation
systems, banking systems, inventory controls, and other similar systems.
• Established languages such as Structured Query Language (SQL) are used for
accessing these data in RDBMS.

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2.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 & 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.
• Some common examples of machine-generated unstructured data include sensor data
from traffic, buildings, industries, satellite imagery, surveillance videos, and others.
• As already evident from its examples, this data type does not have fixed formats
associated with it, which makes it very difficult for querying algorithms to perform a
look-up.
• Querying languages such as NoSQL (Non SQL) are generally used for this data type.

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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.
• 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 data, 2) Time critical data, and 3) Normal data.
1) Very time critical data:
• Data from sources such as flight control systems, healthcare, and other such sources, which
need immediate decision support, are deemed as very critical.
• These data have a very low threshold of processing latency, typically in the range of a few
milliseconds.
• Here, the need for processing the data in place or almost nearer to the source is crucial in
achieving the deployment success of such domains.

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2. Time critical data:
• Data from sources that can tolerate normal processing latency are deemed as time critical
data.
• These data, generally associated with sources such as vehicles, traffic, machine systems,
smart home systems, surveillance systems, and others, which can tolerate a latency of a
few seconds fall in this category.
• The processing requirements allow for the transmission of data to be processed to remote
locations/processors such as clouds.
3. Normal data:
• Finally, the last category of data, normal data, can tolerate a processing latency of a few
minutes to a few hours and are typically associated with less data-sensitive domains such
as agriculture, environmental monitoring, and others.
• The data sources (normal) typically have no particular time requirements for processing
urgently & are pursued without hurry as such.

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Processing Topologies:
• The various processing solutions are divided into two large topologies:
1. On-site processing topologies
2. Off-site processing topologies:
It further divides into
i. Remote processing topologies ii. Collaborative processing topologies

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1. On-site processing:
• In this topology, the data is processed at the source itself.
• It is used in applications that have a very low tolerance for latencies.
• These latencies may result from the processing hardware or the network.
• Applications such as healthcare & flight control systems (real-time systems).
• The processing infrastructure is fast and robust enough to handle such data (See figure 2)

Figure 2. Shows the Event detection using on-site processing topology

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• From the Fig 2.
where an event (here, fire) is detected utilizing a temperature sensor connected to a
sensor node. The sensor node processes the information from the sensed event and generates
an alert. The node additionally has the option of forwarding the data to a remote infra
structure for further analysis and storage.
2. Off-site processing :
• Here processing is not done at the source point.
• It allows for latencies (more delay) and is significantly cheaper than on-site processing
topologies.
• In this topology, the sensor node is responsible for the collection and framing of data to be
transmitted to another location for processing.
• Simpler sensor node borrows processing from high processing enabled device to
accomplish their task.
• Multiple nodes can come together to share their processing power to collaboratively
process the data.

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It is divided into TWO types:
i) Remote processing:
• It is the most common processing topology used in present-day IoT solutions.
• It encompasses sensing data by various sensor nodes.
• The data is then forwarded to a remote server or a cloud-based infrastructure for
further processing and analytics.
• Figure 3, Shows the outline of one such model, where the sensing of an event is
performed locally, and the decision-making is outsourced to a remote processor (here
cloud).

Figure 3 Event detection using an off-site remote processing topology

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• The processing of data from hundreds and thousands of sensor nodes can be
simultaneously offloaded to a single, powerful computing platform.
– Advantages:
• Massive cost and energy savings by enabling the reuse and reallocation of
the same processing resource.
• It ensures the massive scalability of solutions, without significantly
affecting the cost of the deployment.

– Drawback:
• It requires a lot of network bandwidth
• Need good network connectivity between the sensor nodes and the remote
processing infrastructure.

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ii) Collaborative processing:
• Here Sensors cooperatively process data from multiple sources to serve a high-level
task.
• It typically finds use in scenarios with limited or no network connectivity.
• This topology can be quite economical for large-scale deployments spread over vast
areas, where providing networked access to a remote infrastructure is not viable.
• In such scenarios, the simplest solution is to club together the processing power of nearby
processing nodes and collaboratively process the data in the vicinity of the data source
itself.
• This approach also reduces latencies due to the transfer of data over the network.
Additionally, it conserves bandwidth of the network, especially ones connecting to the
Internet.
• One important point to mention about this topology is the preference of mesh networks for
easy implementation of this topology.

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• This topology can be quite beneficial for applications such as agriculture,
environmental and building monitoring and surveillance, pollution
monitoring ,health care and earthquake etc.
Figure 4 Shows the collaborative processing topology for collaboratively processing
data locally.

Figure 4 Event detection using a collaborative processing topology

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IoT Device Design and Selection Considerations:
• The processor is the main factor for IoT device design and selection for various
applications.
• Other important considerations to design an IoT device are :
1) Size
2) Energy
3) Cost
4) Memory
5) Processing power
6) I/O rating
7) Add-ons

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1. Size:
• Size and energy consumption are crucial factors of a sensor node.
• The larger the size factor consumes more energy.
• Additionally, large-size factors are not suitable for many IoT applications.
2. Energy:
• Energy efficient processor is the most important factor in designing IoT- based sensing
solutions.
• The higher the energy requirements, the higher the battery replacement frequency. This
principle is not a good option for IoT-based applications.
3. Cost:
• Cheaper cost of the hardware enables a much higher density of hardware deployment.
• For example, cheaper gas and fire detection solutions would enable users to include much
more sensing hardware for a lesser cost.

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4. Memory:
• Devices with higher memory tend to be costlier. But features such as local data processing,
data storage, data filtering, data formatting, and a host of other features rely heavily on the
memory capabilities of devices.

5. Processing power:
• In deciding what type of sensors can be accommodated with the IoT device/node, and what
processing features can integrate on-site.
• The processing power also decides the type of applications the device can be associated
with.
• For example, if the application involves video or audio needs more processing power than
other simple sensing IoT applications.

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6. Input /output (I/O) rating:
• 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.
• Some processors have a meager I/O voltage rating of 3.3 V, as compared to 5 V for
somewhat older processors.
• This needs additional voltage and logic conversion circuitry and increases the cost and
complexity of the node.

7.Add-ons:
• IoT device provides, such analog to digital conversion (ADC) units, connections to USB
and ethernet, and inbuilt wireless access capabilities for various IoT applications.
• These add-ons also decide how fast a solution can be developed others helps in defining the
robustness and usability of a processor or IoT device in various application scenarios.

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Processing Offloading:
• The processing offloading model is important for the development of densely deployable,
energy-conserving and cheap IoT-based solutions for sensing tasks.
• Figure. 5 shows the typical outline of an IoT deployment with the various layers of
processing that are encountered spanning vastly different application domains—from as
near as sensing the environment to as far as cloud-based infrastructure.
• Starting from the primary layer of sensing, we can have multiple sensing types tasked with
detecting an environment (fire, surveillance, and others).
• The sensors enabling these sensing types are integrated with a processor using wired or
wireless connections (mostly, wired).
• In the event that certain applications require immediate processing of the sensed data, an
on-site processing topology is followed, similar to the one in Figure 2. However, for the
majority of IoT applications, the bulk of the processing is carried out remotely in order to
keep the on-site devices simple, small, and economical.

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Figure 6.5 The various data generating and storage sources connected to the Internet and the
large of data types contained within it.
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The processing procedure is as follows:
• 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.
• The edge layer makes use of devices within the local network to process data that which is
similar to the collaborative processing topology shown in Figure 4.
• The devices within the local network, till the fog, generally communicate using short-
range wireless connections.
• In case the data needs to be sent further up the chain to the cloud, long-range wireless
• connection enabling access to a backbone network is essential.
• Fog-based processing is still considered local because the fog nodes are typically
localized within a geographic area and serve the IoT nodes within a much smaller
coverage area as compared to the cloud.
• Finally, the approach of forwarding data to a cloud or a remote server the device to be
connected to the internet.

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 Data offloading is divided into three parts:
1) offload location
(which outlines where all the processing can be offloaded in the IoT architecture),
2) offload decision making
(how to choose where to offload the processing to and by how much), and finally
3) offloading considerations
(deciding when to offload).

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1.Offload location:
• The choice of offload location decides the applicability, cost, and sustainability of the IoT
application and deployment.
• We distinguish the offload location into four types: a) Edge b) Fog c) Remote Server d)
Cloud.
1. 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.
2. 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.
• The data, computing, storage and applications are shifted to a place between the data source
and the cloud resulting in significantly reduced latencies and network bandwidth usage.
3. 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.

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4.Cloud:
• A cloud is provisioned for processing offloading so that processing resources can be
rapidly provisioned with minimal effort over the Internet, which can be accessed globally.
Cloud enables massive scalability of solutions.
2) Offload decision making
• The choice of where to offload and how much to offload is addressed considering data
generation rate, network bandwidth, the criticality of applications, processing resource
available at the offload site, and other factors.
• Some of these approaches are as follows.
1. Naive Approach
2. Bargaining based approach:
3. Learning based approach:

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1.Naive Approach:
• This rule-based approach, in which the data from IoT devices are offloaded to the nearest
location based on the achievement of certain offload criteria.
• Statistical measures are consulted for generating the rules for offload decision making.
2. Bargaining based approach:
• Bargaining based solutions try to maximize the Quality of service (Parameters such as
bandwidth, latencies) by trying to reach a point where the qualities of certain parameters are
reduced, while the others are enhanced.
• QoS is achieved collaboratively for better full implementation.
3. Learning based approach:
• It relies (depends) on past behavior and trends of data flow through the IoT architecture.
• The optimization of QoS parameters is pursued by learning from historical trends and trying
to optimize previous solutions further and enhance the collective behavior of the IoT
implementation.

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3. Offloading considerations:
• offloading parameters need to be considered while deciding upon the offloading
type to choose arising from the nature of the IoT application and the
hardware being used to interact with the application.
• These parameters are as follows.
a. Bandwidth
b. Latency
c. Criticality
d. Resources
e. Data volume

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a. Bandwidth:
• The maximum amount of data that can be simultaneously transmitted over the network
between two points.
• The bandwidth of a wired or wireless network is also considered to be its data-carrying
capacity and often used to describe the data rate of that network.
b. Latency:
• It is the time delay between the start and completion of an operation, which is due to
physical limitations of the infrastructure in the network (network latency) or the processor
(processing latency) which is associated with an operation.
c. Criticality:
• It defines importance of a task being pursued by an IoT application. The more critical a
task is, the lesser latency is expected.
• For example, detection of fires using an IoT solution has higher criticality than detection of
agricultural field parameters.

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d) Resources:
• It signifies the actual capabilities (like processing power, the analytical algorithm,
etc) of an offload location.
e) Data volume:
• The amount of data generated by a source or sources that can be simultaneously
handled by the offload location.
• Typically, for large and dense IoT deployments, the offload location should be
robust enough to address the processing issues related to massive data volumes.

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 Assignment
1. What are the different data formats found in IoT network traffic streams?
2. Depending on the urgency of data processing, how are IoT data classied?
3. Highlight the pros and cons of on-site and off-site processing.
4. Differentiate between structured and unstructured data.
5. How is collaborative processing different from remote processing?
6. What are the critical factors to be considered during the design of IoT devices?
7. What are the typical data offload locations available in the context of IoT?
8. What are the various decision making approaches chosen for offloading data in
IoT?

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