UniPreCIS: A data preprocessing solution for collocated services on shared IoT

Next-generation smart city applications, attributed to the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS), significantly rely on sensing data quality. With an exponential increase in intelligent applications for urban development and enterprises offering sensing-as-a-service these days, it is imperative that a shared sensing infrastructure could thwart the better utilization of resources. However, a shared sensing infrastructure that leverages low-cost sensing devices for a cost-effective solution remains unexplored territory. A significant research effort is still needed to make edge-based data shaping solutions more reliable, feature-rich, and cost-effective while addressing the associated challenges in sharing the sensing infrastructure among multiple collocated services with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Towards this, we propose UniPreCIS, a novel edge-based data preprocessing solution that accounts for the inherent characteristics of low-cost ambient sensors and their exhibited measurement dynamics concerning application-specific QoS. UniPreCIS aims to identify and select quality data sources by performing sensor ranking and selection that dynamically adapts to the change in sensor attributes. Finally, multimodal data preprocessing is performed in a unified manner to meet heterogeneous application QoS and, at the same time, reduce the resource consumption footprint for the resource-constrained network edge. We study the effectiveness of UniPreCIS on a real-world testbed deployed on our campus. As observed, the processing time and memory utilization of the stakeholder services have been reduced in the proposed approach while achieving up to 90% accuracy, which is arguably significant compared to state-of-the-art sensing techniques.