Fault tolerant data offloading in opportunistic fog enhanced IoT architecture

Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized by the large volumes of data collection. Since IoT devices are themselves resource-constrained, this data is transferred to cloud-based systems for further processing. This data collected over a period of time possesses high utility as it is useful for multiple analytical, predictive and prescriptive tasks. Therefore, it is crucial that IoT devices transfer the collected data to network gateways before exhausting their storage to prevent loss of data; this issue is referred to as the "data offloading problem". This paper proposes a technique for fault tolerant offloading of data by IoT devices such that the data collected by them is transferred to the cloud with a minimal loss. The proposed technique employs opportunistic contacts between IoT and mobile fog nodes to provide a fault tolerant enhancement to the IoT architecture. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through simulation experiments to assess the reduction in data loss by use of proposed data offloading scheme. It is demonstrated that the method outperforms a state-of-art method.