Balancing security and performance in edge-cloud IoT communication

Sammanfattning

Rapid growth in IoT deployments has led to increasingly complex and feature-rich systems, where functionality and services are distributed across the architecture. Data is often generated by resource-constrained sensing devices and processed across the edge–cloud infrastructure. This architectural distribution enables scalable and low-latency data processing but also introduces additional security requirements, especially for communication between system components. Communication between the edge and the cloud must be secured to prevent unauthorized access and protect data during transmission. Security mechanisms introduce additional computational overhead, which can negatively affect system performance and usability. Balancing the trade-offs that come with securing the network is a key challenge in edge-cloud IoT systems. The aim of this study is to provide practical insight into how communication between the edge and the cloud in IoT systems can be secured while maintaining acceptable performance, by evaluating the trade-offs between protection and efficiency in realistic operating conditions. A review of existing research on IoT communication security is combined with an experimental evaluation in a real edge-cloud environment. The identified and selected security mechanisms are implemented and compared using empirical measurements. The findings show that different security mechanisms introduce different but manageable performance trade-offs. Both Transport Layer Security and Virtual Private Network achieve latency and CPU utilisation close to the unencrypted baseline. Virtual Private Network introduces slightly higher overhead and latency variation compared to Transport Layer Security, the results remain stable in both experimental setups. This provides empirical evidence that common security mechanisms can be deployed on modern edge devices without causing significant performance degradation. The mechanisms operate at different layers of the networking stack and provide different security scopes, both approaches are viable options for securing edge-cloud communication in IoT systems.