SmartEdge: An end-to-end encryption framework for an edge-enabled smart city application

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to transform communities around the globe into smart cities. The massive deployment of sensor-embedded devices in the smart cities generates voluminous amounts of data that need to be stored and processed in an efficient manner. Long-haul data transmission to the remote cloud data centers leads to higher delay and bandwidth consumption. In smart cities, the delay-sensitive applications have stringent requirements in term of response time. To reduce latency and bandwidth consumption, edge computing plays a pivotal role. The resource-constrained smart devices at the network core need to offload computationally complex tasks to the edge devices located in their vicinity and have relatively higher resources. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end encryption framework, SmartEdge, for a smart city application by executing computationally complex tasks at the network edge and cloud data centers. Using a lightweight symmetric encryption technique, we establish a secure connection among the smart core devices for multimedia streaming towards the registered and verified edge devices. Upon receiving the data, the edge devices encrypts the multimedia streams, encodes them, and broadcast to the cloud data centers. Prior to the broadcasting, each edge device establishes a secured connection with a data center that relies on the combination of symmetric and asymmetric encryption techniques. In SmartEdge, the execution of a lightweight encryption technique at the resource-constrained smart devices, and relatively complex encryption techniques at the network edge and cloud data centers reduce the resource utilization of the entire network. The proposed framework reduces the response time, security overhead, computational and communication costs, and has a lower end-to-end encryption delay for participating entities. Moreover, the proposed scheme is highly resilient against various adversarial attacks.