IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023 - 42

A Futuristic Architecture for Consumer IoT (CIoT)
new pioneering solutions in many IoT domains by
reducing the latency for IoT devices. Although the
disruptive 5G networks can overcome latency
issues, integrating the latest technology with CIoT
devices remains challenging. Mission-critical applications
like smart healthcare and smart homes
need subsecond responses to carry out actions to
save consumers' lives.
Reliability and scalability: Reliability is of paramount
importance, especially for mission-critical
CIoT applications like monitoring or healthcare.
Centralized solutions with high-latency, security,
and computation problems reduce the current
CIoT system's reliability. When we discuss scalability
in the CIoT scenario, the number of endpoints
is less. However, the frequency and the
divergent ME-centric data generation with varying
sizes from a thermostat message to the big monitoring
video files need efficient data handling.
Overcoming scalability and reliability issues starts
with building robust, efficient solutions away from
the cloud.
Security and privacy: Security and privacy is
another imperative requirement in the CIoT landscape.
The ME-centric data revolving around a
consumer are sensitive and need additional security
and privacy, a deep-rooted issue in cloudbased
storage. Establishing trust among the CIoT
devices and sharing ME-centric data requires
decentralized management. Since the number of
connected CIoT devices and the volume of data
are growing expeditiously, centralized cloud storage
with security breaches and single point of
failure will not sustain in the long run.
Data governance: There is a growing interest
in using the ME-centric data to improve the
applications, thereby enhancing user experience.
The ME-centric data life cycle starts from
the CIoT devices and goes through various
layers before storage and visualization. The MEcentric
data thus collected after a long cycle
should guarantee integrity and sovereignty and
should not be misused without the person's consent
to whom it belongs.
These insights remind us that the CIoT applications
hosting various CIoT devices with MECentric
data revolving around the consumer
need a new computing architecture for efficient
functioning. This article explores multiple avenues
and proposes a novel decentralized ME42
FIGURE
2. Edge computing architecture.
centric framework-a futuristic approach
enabling a seamless user experience, enhancing
horizontal integration among IoT domains.
DECENTRALIZED ME-CENTRIC CIOT
ARCHITECTURE: ENABLING
TECHNOLOGIES
CIoT, a predominant player in IoT, is becoming
progressive due to its broad adoption in daily
lives. This hyperconnectivity of CIoT devices to
exchange ME-centric data has motivated us to
explore a new decentralized ME-centric computing
architecture andpotential technologies to support
it and create value for the CIoT services.
Edge Computing
Edge computing is a motivating move in
prominence and defined as a part of a distributed
computing topology in which information
processing can be close to the edge-where
things and consumers produce and consume
that information.2 Figure 2 depicts a traditional
edge computing architecture. Edge computing
is proposed as an alternative to cloud technologies
for ME-centric data computing. A key
aspect for edge computing over CIoT is to combat
network latency since CIoT applications
include critical systems like healthcare that
require subsecond response time. We need a
combination of edge and cloud computing, a
hybrid cloud to process ME-centric data and
meet the requirements of CIoT applications
with less latency. Some of the key motivational
points to use edge for computing are discussed
as follows.
Latency/Delay: Generally, the CIoT devices
have less computational power. Storing and
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