QoS-Aware Fog Nodes Placement

Abstract

Fog computing has appeared as a favorable technology that can bring cloud applications closer to the physical IoT devices at the network edge but there is neither a common fog computing architecture 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 decision-making capabilities. Therefore, the gateway is made smarter with Fog capabilities and named as Fog Smart Gateway (FSG). The processing of IoT traffic is taken care of by Virtual Machines (VMs) facilitated by distributed Fog nodes. We optimized the number of fog nodes for deployment to reduce the total latency induced by traffic aggregation and processing. Our results show that the optimal deployment of fog nodes in the IoT network could yield a reduction in latency compared to processing IoT data in a conventional cloud system.