Appropriate Deployment of Fog Nodes for IoT Services

Abstract

The Fog computing technology has come out as a feasible option to reduce the gap between cloud applications and the the physical IoT devices present at the network edge but there exists neither a common fog computing architecture nor a common accepted concept of what is fog node, how and where to deploy the fog node or how it supports real-time Internet of Things (IoT) service execution. Edge devices such as the switch, router, gateway, mobile phones, smart car etc., are the candidates for deployment of fog nodes but the deployment differs according to the application. In this work, we have taken gateways as candidates for fog node deployment. The gateway collects data from smart sensors, but it does not have any pre-processing or decisionmaking capabilities. Therefore, the gateway is made smarter with Fog capabilities and named as Fog Smart Gateway (FSG). Virtual Machines (VMs) facilitated with distributed Fog nodes take care of the IoT traffic processing. We optimized the number of fog nodes to be deployed for bringing a reduction in the overall latency incurred caused by traffic processing and aggregation. Our results show that the optimal deployment of fog nodes in the IoT setup cause a reduction in latency in comparison to conventional method of IoT data processing in a cloud system.