RaSEC: an intelligent framework for reliable and secure multi-level edge computing in industrial environments

Industrial applications generate big data with redundant information that is transmitted over heterogeneous networks. The transmission of big data with redundant information not only increases the overall end-to-end delay but also increases the computational load on servers which affects the performance of industrial applications. To address these challenges, we propose an intelligent framework named Reliable and Secure multi-level Edge Computing (RaSEC), which operates in three phases. In the first phase, level-one edge devices apply a lightweight aggregation technique on the generated data. This technique not only reduces the size of the generated data but also helps in preserving the privacy of data sources. In the second phase, a multistep process is used to register level-two edge devices (LTEDs) with high-level edge devices (HLEDs). Due to the registration process, only legitimate LTEDs can forward data to the HLEDs, and as a result, the computational load on HLEDs decreases. In the third phase, the HLEDs use a convolutional neural network to detect the presence of moving objects in the data forwarded by LTEDs. If a movement is detected, the data is uploaded to the cloud servers for further analysis; otherwise, the data is discarded to minimize the use of computational resources on cloud computing platforms. The proposed framework reduces the response time by forwarding useful information to the cloud servers and can be utilized by various industrial applications. Our theoretical and experimental results confirm the resiliency of our framework with respect to security and privacy threats.