Distributed computing in IoT: System-on-a-chip for smart cameras as an example

There are four major components in application systems with internet-of-things (IoT): sensors, communications, computation and service, where large amount of data are acquired for ultra-big data analysis to discover the context information and knowledge behind signals. To support such large-scale data size and computation tasks, it is not feasible to employ centralized solutions on cloud servers. Thanks for the advances of silicon technology, the cost of computation become lower, and it is possible to distribute computation on every node in IoT. In this paper, we take video sensing network as an example to show the idea of distributed computing in IoT. Existing related works are reviewed and the architecture of a system-on-a-chip solution for distributed smart cameras is proposed with coarse-grained reconfigurable image stream processing architecture. It can accelerate various computer vision algorithms for distributed smart cameras in IoT.