Abstract: In the field of Internet of things (IoT) technology, by collaborating the cloud computing and the edge computing, building the cloud-edge collaboration based IoT can significantly reduce the traffic load in the core network and the service latency of IoT services. However, traditional cryptography technology cannot resist the attacks from quantum computers, which challenges the data transmission security of IoT. To tackle this challenge, quantum key distribution (QKD) can be applied to enhance the security of the cloud-edge collaboration based IoT. A security architecture of cloud-edge collaboration is designed that based optical-quantum IoT with QKD, an IoT gateway model and a workflow with quantum key service embedded. Additionally, in the architecture, to carry the IoT services and distribute keys for them, the key supply capability attribute of nodes oriented to the key demands of services and the key-supply-capability-aware resource allocation method is proposed. The performance of the proposed method in terms of key distribution success ratio, average key consumption of services and key resource utilization ratio is verified by simulation. The simulation results show that compared with the baseline, the proposed method can significantly improve the key distribution success ratio.

Key words: cloud-edge collaboration, optical-quantum Internet of things, quantum key distribution, resource allocation