A Reduced Network Traffic Method for IoT Data Clustering

Internet of Things (IoT) systems usually involve interconnected, low processing capacity, and low memory sensor nodes (devices) that collect data in several sorts of applications that interconnect people and things. In this scenario, mining tasks, such as clustering, have been commonly deployed to detect behavioral patterns from the collected data. The centralized clustering of IoT data demands high network traffic to transmit the data from the devices to a central node, where a clustering algorithm must be applied. This approach does not scale as the number of devices increases, and the amount of data grows. However, distributing the clustering process through the devices may not be a feasible approach as well, since the devices are usually simple and may not have the ability to execute complex procedures. This work proposes a centralized IoT data clustering method that demands reduced network traffic and low processing power in the devices. The proposed method uses a data grid to summarize the information at the devices before transmitting it to the central node, reducing network traffic. After the data transfer, the proposed method applies a clustering algorithm that was developed to process data in the summarized representation. Tests with seven datasets provided experimental evidence that the proposed method reduces network traffic and produces results comparable to the ones generated by DBSCAN and HDBSCAN, two robust centralized clustering algorithms.