Energy-efficient and secure mobile fog-based cloud for the Internet of Things

The mobile fog-based cloud (MFBC) plays a major role for the Internet of Things (IoT) and is highly suitable for obtaining virtualized data without additional waiting time. However, the limited battery power of mobile devices limits access to abundant data. To address this problem, an energy-efficient and secure algorithm should be introduced to reduce energy consumption for the MFBC. In this paper, an energy-efficient and secure hybrid (EESH) algorithm is introduced for the MFBC to support the IoT. The EESH algorithm uses the voltage scaling factor to reduce energy consumption. The performance of the EESH algorithm is substantially better than the state-of-the-art contending algorithms when the number of IoT-tasks increases, and EESH consumes minimal energy. Furthermore, the identity of mobile cloud users is of paramount significance; therefore, the EESH is further secured by applying a malicious data detection (MDD) algorithm using blockchain technology. The capability of the processors on the server side of the MFBC is analyzed and improved for the IoT. The proposed EESH, MDD and underlying algorithms are programmed on the Java platform. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithms on the MFBC is compared with that of known algorithms in terms of security, energy efficiency, throughput and latency. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.