Trust-empowered, IoT-driven legitimate data offloading

Abstract

In an IoT environment deployed on top of fog and/or cloud nodes, offloading data between nodes is a common practice that aims at lessening the burden on these nodes and hence, meeting some real-time processing requirements. Existing initiatives put emphasis on “when to offload” and “where to offload” using criteria like resource constraint, load balancing, and data safety during transfer. However, there is limited emphasis on the trustworthiness of those nodes that will accept the offloaded data putting these data at risk of misuse. To address this limited emphasis, this paper advocates for trust as a decision criterion for identifying the appropriate nodes for hosting the offloaded data. A trust model is designed and then, developed considering factors like legitimacy, quality-of-service, and quality-of-experience. A system demonstrating the technical doability of the trust model is presented in the paper, as well