An Alertness-Adjustable Cloud/Fog IoT Solution for Timely Environmental Monitoring Based on Wildfire Risk Forecasting

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) appliances, especially those realized through wireless sensor networks (WSNs), have been a dominant subject for heavy research in the environmental and agricultural sectors. To address the ever-increasing demands for real-time monitoring and sufficiently handle the growing volumes of raw data, the cloud/fog computing paradigm is deemed a highly promising solution. This paper presents a WSN-based IoT system that seamlessly integrates all aforementioned technologies, having at its core the cloud/fog hybrid network architecture. The system was intensively validated using a demo prototype in the Ionian University facilities, focusing on response time, an important metric of future smart applications. Further, the developed prototype is able to autonomously adjust its sensing behavior based on the criticality of the prevailing environmental conditions, regarding one of the most notable climate hazards, wildfires. Extensive experimentation verified its efficiency and reported on its alertness and highly conforming characteristics considering the use-case scenario of Corfu Island’s 2019 fire risk severity. In all presented cases, it is shown that through fog leveraging it is feasible to contrive significant delay reduction, with high precision and throughput, whilst controlling the energy consumption levels. Finally, a user-driven web interface is highlighted to accompany the system; it is capable of augmenting the data curation and visualization, and offering real-time wildfire risk forecasting based on Chandler’s burning index scoring.

Applications of Integrated IoT-Fog-Cloud Systems to Smart Cities: A Survey

“…iIFCs can offer smart services for environmental monitoring, like air quality, river, coastal, and noise monitoring [113,114]. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) can be installed and organized to observe and communicate the present conditions of environment to deployed fog and cloud services for data collection and examination [115][116][117][118]. Advanced services, like alert services to actual values to predefined thresholds and communicate undesirable environmental situations, can be integrated in the cloud.…”

“…Furthermore, there are many advantages of utilizing fog computing for environmental monitoring applications in smart cities. These advantages include decreasing communication traffic between the used WSN and the cloud, reducing energy spending of the IoT and WSN, and extending the life of these devices [115]. In addition, fog computing can improve the reliability and efficiency of environmental monitoring processes [116].…”

IoT-Based Digital Twin for Energy Cyber-Physical Systems: Design and Implementation

“…Turning the current power grid into an IoT technology-dependent one means that a large number of data are harvested from the physical assets' sensors and the cyber assets' controllers. This will greatly affect our current understanding of the energy sector [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. An example of the sensors and data shared in a microgrid can be found in [13], where energy management as a cloud service was explored to provide a control platform for a residential microgrid.…”

Network resource optimization in cloud computing environments

“…is presented, a prototype system incorporating the outlined logic. The basis for this deliberation is found in [218].…”

“…is programmed to autonomously conform its behavior based on the risk degree scale regarding Corfu Island, where the experiment takes place. The results are part of the work in [218]. J.6.1 Fire-Risk Retrieval Figure J.12 describes the fire-risk retrieval procedure in depth.…”