Abstract
The mobile fog-based cloud (MFBC) plays a major role for the Internet of Things (IoT) and is highly suitable for obtaining virtualized data without additional waiting time. However, the limited battery power of mobile devices limits access to abundant data. To address this problem, an energy-efficient and secure algorithm should be introduced to reduce energy consumption for the MFBC. In this paper, an energy-efficient and secure hybrid (EESH) algorithm is introduced for the MFBC to support the IoT. The EESH algorithm uses the voltage scaling factor to reduce energy consumption. The performance of the EESH algorithm is substantially better than the state-of-the-art contending algorithms when the number of IoT-tasks increases, and EESH consumes minimal energy. Furthermore, the identity of mobile cloud users is of paramount significance; therefore, the EESH is further secured by applying a malicious data detection (MDD) algorithm using blockchain technology. The capability of the processors on the server side of the MFBC is analyzed and improved for the IoT. The proposed EESH, MDD and underlying algorithms are programmed on the Java platform. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithms on the MFBC is compared with that of known algorithms in terms of security, energy efficiency, throughput and latency.
•The EESH algorithm consists of the energy consumption model that reduces the static and non-static energy consumption for the MFBC, which is mostly affected by input rise time, input voltage level, output loading, output voltage, and power dissipation capacitance.•The EESH involves the machine power calculation and job-scheduling modules which determines the remaining power of the MFBC. These modules schedule and allocate the tasks for the mobile cloud users in a time-series fashion.•Features of EESH enable faster and more efficient search of data contents in the MFBC for the IoT.•In handling the security of mobile cloud users, the malicious data detection algorithm is used with the support of Blockchain technology features, which help to automatically identify malicious blocks of data to avoid any potential threats.•The proposed malicious data detection algorithm possesses a less time complexity that helps to promptly detect the malicious data blocks.