Challenges of IoT Fog

There is a growing requirement for Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to ensure low response time to provision latency-sensitive real-time applications such as health monitoring, disaster management, and smart homes. Fog computing offers a means to provide such requirements, via a virtualized intermediate layer to provide data, computation, storage, and networking services between Cloud datacenters and end users. A key element within such Fog computing environments is resource management. While there are existing resource manager in Fog computing, they only focus on a subset of parameters important to Fog resource management encompassing system response time, network bandwidth, energy consumption and latency. To date no existing Fog resource manager considers these parameters simultaneously for decision making, which in the context of smart homes will become increasingly key. In this paper, we propose a novel resource management technique (ROUTER) for fog-enabled Cloud computing environments, which leverages Particle Swarm Optimization to optimize simultaneously. The approach is validated within an IoT-based smart home automation scenario, and evaluated within iFogSim toolkit driven by empirical models within a small-scale smart home experiment. Results demonstrate our approach results a reduction of 12% network bandwidth, 10% response time, 14% latency and 12.35% in energy consumption.

With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the classic centralized cloud computing paradigm faces several challenges such as high latency, low capacity and network failure. To address these challenges, fog computing brings the cloud closer to IoT devices. The fog provides IoT data processing and storage locally at IoT devices instead of sending them to the cloud. In contrast to the cloud, the fog provides services with faster response and greater quality. Therefore, fog computing may be considered the best choice to enable the IoT to provide efficient and secure services for many IoT users. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of fog computing and its integration with the IoT by highlighting the benefits and implementation challenges. This review will also focus on the architecture of the fog and emerging IoT applications that will be improved by using the fog model. Finally, open issues and future research directions regarding fog computing and the IoT are discussed.