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Opportunistic fog computing: Feasibility assessment and architectural proposal

Abstract:

Cloud computing has been pointed out as one of the pillars of the Internet of Things, providing this emerging infrastructure with unlimited resources and easing its deployment. However, cloud computing relies on remote, mainly centralized resource provisioning, which poses substantial problems in the support of time-critical and location-aware IoT applications. Fog computing, on the other hand, recently emerged as an intermediate solution to solve the mentioned cloud computing limitations, but its embryonic status still prevents it from being used in real developments. In this paper we present a fog computing characterization and assess the feasibility of its use in a worst-case scenario, which we name opportunistic fog network. Subsequently, as a first step towards its effective use and deployment in an IoT scenario, we propose a fog computing network architecture, constituted by virtual clusters running on peer-to-peer overlays, capable of abstracting the complexity of lower layers. Opportunistic fog computing can benefit from thousands of enddevices moving in urban areas everyday, providing connectivity and processing resources to every crowded spot, and promoting green computing by allowing a more efficient local resource usage and by decreasing remote communications to the cloud. Furthermore, opportunistic fog computing overcomes cloud computing drawbacks whenever a set of independent and heterogeneous end-devices agree to share their own resources.