Exploring scalable user mobility impact on energy efficiency, latency and network usage in smart homes

It is anticipated that global IoT devices are set to rise from 10 billion in 2020 to 30 billion by 2030, with the highest number of devices, about 5 billion, expected in China. The increase in users within smart homes directly increases demand for IoT devices, leading to global energy consumption, latency and network usage issues in a Cloud network infrastructure. This study demonstrates the impact of increased users in smart homes through user scalability impact on energy consumption, latency and network bandwidth usage. Positioning data obtained from Phyphox is used as dummy data for this research. The ifogSim2 network simulation toolkit conducts user scalability simulations in a Cloud and Fog-based scenario. The results from the evaluation simulation of user scalability in a Cloud and Fog-based scenario demonstrate an average percentage difference of 3.10%, 90.33% and 33.03% for energy consumption, latency and network usage, respectively. The results indicate that the benefits of Fog computing address the challenges of Cloud computing through optimisation and provide a solution to the global issue of the increased number of IoT devices and users. The percentage difference for energy consumption was the lowest, followed by network usage, and latency was the highest. This variance shows that using and adopting Fog computing in a smart home network architecture is more efficient than traditional Cloud computing. The user scalability further demonstrates that as the number of users increases, the level of energy consumption, latency and network usage increase. Therefore, as the user demand for smart IoT devices increases, adopting Fog computing addresses the challenges associated with Cloud computing and optimises the energy consumption, latency and network usage in a smart home environment.