An Energy-Efficient Homogeneous TBFC Model of the IoT

The IoT (Internet of Things) is one of the most significant infrastructures and is used in various applications. On the other hand, the IoT consumes huge amount of electric energy since devices send tremendous amount of sensor data and various types of resource-consuming applications like AI are executed on servers in clouds. In the TBFC (Tree-Based Fog Computing) model, fog nodes are tree-structured and application processes of sensor data are distributed to fog nodes in order to reduce the energy consumption of the IoT. In this paper, we consider a homogeneous TBFC (HTBFC) model where every fog node is homogeneous. We propose an algorithm to change an HTBFC tree to a less energy-consuming one. In the evaluation, we compare applications which are composed of different numbers of application processes but whose total computation quantities are the same in terms of energy consumption. We show the number of processes where the total energy consumption can be most reduced for each application.