A novel fog-based multi-level energy-efficient framework for IoT-enabled smart environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance the living standard of human life by employing varied smart devices including smart phones, smart watches, sensors, on-board units and other networking equipment. However, these devices consume a considerable amount of energy to perform their operations that has a significant impact on the environment, product cost and life of the device. Given this fact, energy-efficient solutions for smart environments have gained great attention from researchers and the industrial community. In this context, a novel fog-based multi-level energy-efficient framework for IoT-enabled smart environments has been proposed. To achieve this, the proposed framework adds additional two layers in the existing IoT-fog-cloud architecture - sensors-based energy-efficient hardware layer and policy layer, to monitor the energy consumption and to enable the energy-aware decision making. Initially, the main sources of energy consumption in an IoT-enabled smart environment are identified. Further, the energy requirements of a device to perform a specific task are estimated. Moreover, the alternative devices to perform the same task using less energy are searched out. Finally, a device or a set of devices, to process the job consuming lower energy while ensuring the job requirements, is selected. To validate the proposed framework, four case studies are considered - smart parking, smart hospital specifically ICU, smart agriculture and smart airport. Simulations are conducted using iFogsim toolkit and results show that a significant amount of energy can be conserved by employing the proposed framework.