IoTinuum: The IoT Computing Continuum

IoT smart applications must deal with the inherently distributed nature of IoT infrastructures that may vary among different deployments. For example, in urban environments, some deployments may require distributed edge nodes to support the sensors and actuators, while others may skip this processing stage and go directly to the cloud. We propose the concept of an IoT Computing Continuum, or IoTinuum, with multiple computing stages spread over the distributed IoT infrastructure. We present the modeling and implementation of two urban use cases for a 6-stage IoTinuum: smart drone delivery and smart structural monitoring. In our experience, the IoTinuum improves the understanding of function placement in application development and reveals important performance tradeoffs.