Green and Network-Aware Smart IoT Logistics Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) plays a vital role in delivering outstanding logistical services to release any obstacles for people and provide a good experience. IoT logistic solutions are great assets for multiple sectors in smart cities. These solutions including but not limited to inventory tracking and analytics, real-time fleet management, Predictive maintenance. However, the IoT applications for logistics operations is a challenging task, especially, when it aims to reduce energy consumption along with their environmental and economic impacts. Thus, there is a need to have a system that performs IoT applications for logistics operations in an efficient manner. In the light of this challenge, this paper investigates how IoT applications for logistics operations would be efficiently offloaded to minimize the energy consumption and network traffic in fog-cloud systems. Therefore, an energy-efficient approach is proposed to collect data from several sensors (e.g., monitor people locations, health conditions, etc.) and process them either in fog or cloud in a real-time manner. This approach will help in reducing the energy consumption and network traffic to process IoT applications for logistics operations efficiently. The results show that the proposed fog/cloud approach outperforms the traditional approach in terms of decreasing the total power consumption and the Internet network traffic by 55% and 50%, respectively.