Multi-Step Reasoning for IoT Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are growing constantly in numbers, being forecasted to reach 27 billions in 2025. With such a large number of connected devices, the energy consumption concerns are a major priority for the upcoming years. Cloud / edge / fog computing are critically associated with IoT devices as enablers for data communication and coordination among devices. In this paper, we look at the distribution of semantic reasoning between different IoT devices and define a new class of reasoning, multi-step reasoning that can be associated at the level of the edge or fog node in the context of an IoT cloud / edge / fog computing topology. We conduct an experiment based on synthetic datasets to evaluate the performance of multi-step reasoning in terms of power consumption and other metrics. Overall we found that multi-step reasoning can help in reducing computation time and energy consumption on IoT devices in presence of larger datasets.