Biblio

The paradigm of fog computing has set new trends and heights in the modern world networking and have overcome the major technical complexities of cloud computing. It is not a replacement of cloud computing technology but it just adds feasible advanced characteristics to existing cloud computing paradigm.fog computing not only provide storage, networking and computing services but also provide a platform for IoT (internet of things). However, the fog computing technology also arise the threat to privacy and security of the data and services. The existing security and privacy mechanisms of the cloud computing cannot be applied to the fog computing directly due to its basic characteristics of large-scale geo-distribution, mobility and heterogeneity. This article provides an overview of the present existing issues and challenges in fog computing.

The increase of sensitive data in the current Internet of Things (IoT) raises demands of computation, communication and storage capabilities. Indeed, thanks to RFID tags and wireless sensor networks, anything can be part of IoT. As a result, a large amount of data is generated, which is hard for many IoT devices to handle, as many IoT devices are resource-constrained and cannot use the existing standard security protocols. Cloud computing might seem like a convenient solution, since it offers on-demand access to a shared pool of resources such as processors, storage, applications and services. However this comes as a cost, as unnecessary communications not only burden the core network, but also the data center in the cloud. Therefore, considering suitable approaches such as fog computing and security middleware solutions is crucial. In this paper, we propose a novel middleware architecture to solve the above issues, and discuss the generic concept of using fog computing along with cloud in order to achieve a higher security level. Our security middleware acts as a smart gateway as it is meant to pre-process data at the edge of the network. Depending on the received information, data might either be processed and stored locally on fog or sent to the cloud for further processing. Moreover, in our scheme, IoT constrained devices communicate through the proposed middleware, which provide access to more computing power and enhanced capability to perform secure communications. We discuss these concepts in detail, and explain how our proposal is effective to cope with some of the most relevant IoT security challenges.

Some IoT data are time-sensitive and cannot be processed in clouds, which are too far away from IoT devices. Fog computing, located as close as possible to data sources at the edge of IoT systems, deals with this problem. Some IoT data are sensitive and require privacy controls. The proposed Policy Enforcement Fog Module (PEFM), running within a single fog, operates close to data sources connected to their fog, and enforces privacy policies for all sensitive IoT data generated by these data sources. PEFM distinguishes two kinds of fog data processing. First, fog nodes process data for local IoT applications, running within the local fog. All real-time data processing must be local to satisfy real-time constraints. Second, fog nodes disseminate data to nodes beyond the local fog (including remote fogs and clouds) for remote (and non-real-time) IoT applications. PEFM has two components for these two kinds of fog data processing. First, Local Policy Enforcement Module (LPEM), performs direct privacy policy enforcement for sensitive data accessed by local IoT applications. Second, Remote Policy Enforcement Module (RPEM), sets up a mechanism for indirectly enforcing privacy policies for sensitive data sent to remote IoT applications. RPEM is based on creating and disseminating Active Data Bundles-software constructs bundling inseparably sensitive data, their privacy policies, and an execution engine able to enforce privacy policies. To prove effectiveness and efficiency of the solution, we developed a proof-of-concept scenario for a smart home IoT application. We investigate privacy threats for sensitive IoT data and show a framework for using PEFM to overcome these threats.

Fog computing provides a new architecture for the implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT), which can connect sensor nodes to the cloud using the edge of the network. This structure has improved the latency and energy consumption in the cloud. In this heterogeneous and distributed environment, resource allocation is very important. Hence, scheduling will be a challenge to increase productivity and allocate resources appropriately to the tasks. Programs that run in this environment should be protected from intruders. We consider three parameters as authentication, integrity, and confidentiality to maintain security in fog devices. These parameters have time and computational overhead. In the proposed approach, we schedule the modules for the run in fog devices by heuristic algorithms based on data mining technique. The objective function is included CPU utilization, bandwidth, and security overhead. We compare the proposed algorithm with several heuristic algorithms. The results show that our proposed algorithm improved the average energy consumption of 63.27%, cost 44.71% relative to the PSO, ACO, SA algorithms.

Technology specific expert knowledge is often required to analyse security configurations and determine potential vulnerabilities, but it becomes difficult when it is a new technology such as Fog computing. Furthermore, additional knowledge is also required regarding how the security configuration has been constructed in respect to an organisation's security policies. Traditionally, organisations will often manage their access control permissions relative to their employees needs, posing challenges to administrators. This problem is even exacerbated in Fog computing systems where security configurations are implemented on a large amount of devices at the edges of Internet, and the administrators are required to retain adequate knowledge on how to perform complex administrative tasks. In this paper, a novel approach of translating object-based security configurations in to a graph model is presented. A technique is then developed to autonomously identify vulnerabilities and perform security auditing of large systems without the need for expert knowledge. Throughout the paper, access control configuration data is used as a case study, and empirical analysis is performed on synthetically generated access control permissions.

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET) are the creation of several vehicles communicating with each other in order to create a network capable of communication and data exchange. One of the most promising methods for security and trust amongst vehicular networks is the usage of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). However, current implementations of PKI as a security solution for determining the validity and authenticity of vehicles in a VANET is not efficient due to the usage of large amounts of delay and computational overhead. In this paper, we investigate the potential of PKI when predictively and preemptively passing along certificates to roadside units (RSU) in an effort to lower delay and computational overhead in a dynamic environment. We look to accomplish this through utilizing fog computing and propose a new protocol to pass certificates along the projected path.

Edge Computing is a scheme to improve the performance, latency and security guidelines for IoT applications. However, edge deployment of an application also comes with additional complexity in management, an increased attack surface for security vulnerability, and could potentially result in a more expensive solution. As a result, the conditions under which an edge deployment of IoT applications delivers a better solution is not always obvious. Metrics which would be able to predict whether or not an IoT application is suitable for edge deployment can provide useful insights to address this question. In this paper, we examine the key performance indicators for IoT applications, namely the responsiveness, scalability and cost models for different types of IoT applications. Our analysis identifies that network centrality of an IoT application is a key characteristic which determines whether or not an IoT application is a good candidate for edge deployment. We discuss the different measures of network centrality that can be used to characterize applications, and the relative performance of edge deployment compared to centralized deployment for various IoT applications.

Automation of real time car parking system (RTCPS) using mobile cloud computing (MCC) and vehicular networking (VN) has given rise to a novel concept of integrated communication-computing platforms (ICCP). The aim of ICCP is to evolve an effective means of addressing challenges such as improper parking management scheme, traffic congestion in parking lots, insecurity of vehicles (safety applications), and other Infrastructure-to-Vehicle (I2V) services for providing data dissemination and content delivery services to connected Vehicular Clients (VCs). Edge (parking lot based) Fog computing (EFC) through road side sensor based monitoring is proposed to achieve ICCP. A real-time cloud to vehicular clients (VCs) in the context of smart car parking system (SCPS) which satisfies deterministic and non-deterministic constraints is introduced. Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) and intra-Edge-Fog node architecture is presented for ICCP. This is targeted at distributed mini-sized self-energized Fog nodes/data centers, placed between distributed remote cloud and VCs. The architecture processes data-disseminated real-time services to the connected VCs. The work built a prototype testbed comprising a black box PSU, Arduino IoT Duo, GH-311RT ultrasonic distance sensor and SHARP 2Y0A21 passive infrared sensor for vehicle detection; LinkSprite 2MP UART JPEG camera module, SD card module, RFID card reader, RDS3115 metal gear servo motors, FPM384 fingerprint scanner, GSM Module and a VCC web portal. The testbed functions at the edge of the vehicular network and is connected to the served VCs through Infrastructure-to-Vehicular (I2V) TCP/IP-based single-hop mobile links. This research seeks to facilitate urban renewal strategies and highlight the significance of ICCP prototype testbed. Open challenges and future research directions are discussed for an efficient VCC model which runs on networked fog centers (NetFCs).

Cloud computing is a solution to reduce the cost of IT by providing elastic access to shared resources. It also provides solutions for on-demand computing power and storage for devices at the edge networks with limited resources. However, increasing the number of connected devices caused by IoT architecture leads to higher network traffic and delay for cloud computing. The centralised architecture of cloud computing also makes the edge networks more susceptible to challenges in the core network. Fog computing is a solution to decrease the network traffic, delay, and increase network resilience. In this paper, we study how fog computing may improve network resilience. We also conduct a simulation to study the effect of fog computing on network traffic and delay. We conclude that using fog computing prepares the network for better response time in case of interactive requests and makes the edge networks more resilient to challenges in the core network.

The IoT (Internet of Things) is one of the primary reasons for the massive growth in the number of connected devices to the Internet, thus leading to an increased volume of traffic in the core network. Fog and edge computing are becoming a solution to handle IoT traffic by moving timesensitive processing to the edge of the network, while using the conventional cloud for historical analysis and long-term storage. Providing processing, storage, and network communication at the edge network are the aim of fog computing to reduce delay, network traffic, and decentralise computing. In this paper, we define a framework that realises fog computing that can be extended to install any service of choice. Our framework utilises fog nodes as an extension of the traditional switch to include processing, networking, and storage. The fog nodes act as local decision-making elements that interface with software-defined networking (SDN), to be able to push updates throughout the network. To test our framework, we develop an IP spoofing security application and ensure its correctness through multiple experiments.

Vehicular ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been promoted as a key technology that can provide a wide variety of services such as traffic management, passenger safety, as well as travel convenience and comfort. VANETs are now proposed to be part of the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) technology, integrated with Software Defined Networking (SDN), as key enabler of 5G. The technology of fog computing in 5G turned out to be an adequate solution for faster processing in delay sensitive application, such as VANETs, being a hybrid solution between fully centralized and fully distributed networks. In this paper, we propose a three-way integration between VANETs, SDN, and 5G for a resilient VANET security design approach, which strikes a good balance between network, mobility, performance and security features. We show how such an approach can secure VANETs from different types of attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) targeting either the controllers or the vehicles in the network, and how to trace back the source of the attack. Our evaluation shows the capability of the proposed system to enforce different levels of real-time user-defined security, while maintaining low overhead and minimal configuration.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing topic of interest along with 5G. Billions of IoT devices are expected to connect to the Internet in the near future. These devices differ from the traditional devices operated in the Internet. We observe that Information Centric Networking (ICN), is a more suitable architecture for the IoT compared to the prevailing IP basednetwork. However, we observe that recent works that propose to use ICN for IoT, either do not cover the need to integrate Sensor Networks with the Internet to realize IoT or do so inefficiently. Fog computing is a promising technology that has many benefits to offer especially for IoT. In this work, we discover a need to integrate various heterogeneous Sensor Networks with the Internet to realize IoT and propose FOGG: A Fog Computing Based Gateway to Integrate Sensor Networks to Internet. FOGG uses a dedicated device to function as an IoT gateway. FOGG provides the needed integration along with additional services like name/protocol translation, security and controller functionalities.

Cloud computing provides a shared pool of resources for large-scale distributed applications. Recent trends such as fog computing and edge computing spread the workload of clouds closer towards the edge of the network and the users. Exploiting the edge resources efficiently requires managing the resources and directing user traffic to the correct edge servers. In this paper we propose to profile and group users according to their interest profiles. We consider edge caching as an example and through our evaluation show the potential benefits of directing users from the same group to the same caches. We investigate a range of workloads and parameters and the same conclusions apply. Our results highlight the importance of grouping users and demonstrate the potential benefits of this approach.

Vehicular users are expected to consume large amounts of data, for both entertainment and navigation purposes. This will put a strain on cellular networks, which will be able to cope with such a load only if proper caching is in place; this in turn begs the question of which caching architecture is the best-suited to deal with vehicular content consumption. In this paper, we leverage a large-scale, crowd-sourced trace to (i) characterize the vehicular traffic demand, in terms of overall magnitude and content breakup; (ii) assess how different caching approaches perform against such a real-world load; (iii) study the effect of recommendation systems and local content items. We define a price-of-fog metric, expressing the additional caching capacity to deploy when moving from traditional, centralized caching architectures to a "fog computing" approach, where caches are closer to the network edge. We find that for location-specific items, such as the ones that vehicular users are most likely to request, such a price almost disappears. Vehicular networks thus make a strong case for the adoption of mobile-edge caching, as we are able to reap the benefit thereof – including a reduction in the distance travelled by data, within the core network – with little or none of the associated disadvantages.

The exploitation of the opportunistic infrastructure via Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a critical component towards the adoption of new paradigms such as edge and fog computing. While a lot of work has demonstrated the great potential of D2D communication, it is still unclear whether the benefits of the D2D approach can really be leveraged in practice. In this paper, we develop a software sensor, namely Detector, which senses the infrastructure in proximity of a mobile user. We analyze and evaluate D2D on the wild, i.e., not in simulations. We found that in a realistic environment, a mobile is always co-located in proximity to at least one other mobile device throughout the day. This suggests that a device can schedule tasks processing in coordination with other devices, potentially more powerful, instead of handling the processing of the tasks by itself.

In the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet-connected things provide an influx of data and resources that offer unlimited possibility for applications and services. Smart City IoT systems refer to the things that are distributed over wide physical areas covering a whole city. While the new breed of data and resources looks promising, building applications in such large scale IoT systems is a difficult task due to the distributed and dynamic natures of entities involved, such as sensing, actuating devices, people and computing resources. In this paper, we explore the process of developing Smart City IoT applications from a coordination-based perspective. We show that a distributed coordination model that oversees such a large group of distributed components is necessary in building Smart City IoT applications. In particular, we propose Adaptive Distributed Dataflow, a novel Dataflow-based programming model that focuses on coordinating city-scale distributed systems that are highly heterogeneous and dynamic.

Geo-distributed Situation Awareness applications are large in scale and are characterized by 24/7 data generation from mobile and stationary sensors (such as cameras and GPS devices); latency-sensitivity for converting sensed data to actionable knowledge; and elastic and bursty needs for computational resources. Fog computing [7] envisions providing computational resources close to the edge of the network, consequently reducing the latency for the sense-process-actuate cycle that exists in these applications. We propose Foglets, a programming infrastructure for the geo-distributed computational continuum represented by fog nodes and the cloud. Foglets provides APIs for a spatio-temporal data abstraction for storing and retrieving application generated data on the local nodes, and primitives for communication among the resources in the computational continuum. Foglets manages the application components on the Fog nodes. Algorithms are presented for launching application components and handling the migration of these components between Fog nodes, based on the mobility pattern of the sensors and the dynamic computational needs of the application. Evaluation results are presented for a Fog network consisting of 16 nodes using a simulated vehicular network as the workload. We show that the discovery and deployment protocol can be executed in 0.93 secs, and joining an already deployed application can be as quick as 65 ms. Also, QoS-sensitive proactive migration can be accomplished in 6 ms.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is slowly, but steadily, changing the way we interact with our surrounding. Smart cities, smart environments, smart buildings are just a few macroscopic examples of how smart ecosystems are increasingly involved in our daily life, each one offering a different set of information. This information's decentralization and scattering can be exploited, optimizing mobile nodes on-demand information retrieval process. We propose an approach focused on defining competence domains in smart systems where the responsibility of providing a specific information to a mobile node is defined by spatial constraints. By exploiting the interplay and duality of Cloud Computing and Fog Computing we introduce an approach to exploit data spatial allocation in smart systems to optimize mobile nodes information retrieval.

Smart Transportation applications by nature are examples of Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANETs) applications where mobile vehicles, roadside units and transportation infrastructure interplay with one another to provide value added services. While there are abundant researches that focused on the communication aspect of such Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, there are few research bodies that target the development of VANET applications. Among the popular VANET applications, a dominant direction is to leverage Cloud infrastructure to execute and deliver applications and services. Recent studies showed that Cloud Computing is not sufficient for many VANET applications due to the mobility of vehicles and the latency sensitive requirements they impose. To this end, Fog Computing has been proposed to leverage computation infrastructure that is closer to the network edge to compliment Cloud Computing in providing latency-sensitive applications and services. However, applications development in Fog environment is much more challenging than in the Cloud due to the distributed nature of Fog systems. In this paper, we investigate how Smart Transportation applications are developed following Fog Computing approach, their challenges and possible mitigation from the state of the arts.

The notion of edge computing introduces new computing functions away from centralized locations and closer to the network edge and thus facilitating new applications and services. This enhanced computing paradigm is provides new opportunities to applications developers, not available otherwise. In this talk, I will discuss why placing computation functions at the extreme edge of our network infrastructure, i.e., in wireless Access Points and home set-top boxes, is particularly beneficial for a large class of emerging applications. I will discuss a specific approach, called ParaDrop, to implement such edge computing functionalities, and use examples from different domains – smarter homes, sustainability, and intelligent transportation – to illustrate the new opportunities around this concept.

Wearable devices, which are small electronic devices worn on a human body, are equipped with low level of processing and storage capacities and offer some types of integrated functionalities. Recently, wearable device is becoming increasingly popular, various kinds of wearable device are launched in the market; however, wearable devices require a powerful local-hub, most are smartphone, to replenish processing and storage capacities for advanced functionalities. Sometime it may be inconvenient to carry the local-hub (smartphone); thus, many wearable devices are equipped with Wi-Fi interface, enabling them to exchange data with local-hub though the Internet when the local-hub is not nearby. However, this results in long response time and restricted functionalities. In this paper, we present a virtual local-hub solution, which utilizes network equipment nearby (e.g., Wi-Fi APs) as the local-hub. Since migrating all applications serving the wearable devices respectively takes too much networking and storage resources, the proposed solution deploys function modules to multiple network nodes and enables remote function module sharing among different users and applications. To reduce the impact of the solution on the network bandwidth, we propose a heuristic algorithm for function module allocation with the objective of minimizing total bandwidth consumption. We conduct series of experiments, and the results show that the proposed solution can reduce the bandwidth consumption by up to half and still serve all requests given a large number of service requests.

When focusing on the Internet of Things (IoT), communicating and coordinating sensor–actuator data via the cloud involves inefficient overheads and reduces autonomous behavior. The Fog Computing paradigm essentially moves the compute nodes closer to sensing entities by exploiting peers and intermediary network devices. This reduces centralized communication with the cloud and entails increased coordination between sensing entities and (possibly available) smart network gateway devices. In this paper, we analyze the utility of offloading computation among peers when working in fog based deployments. It is important to study the trade-offs involved with such computation offloading, as we deal with resource (energy, computation capacity) limited devices. Devices computing in a distributed environment may choose to locally compute part of their data and communicate the remainder to their peers. An optimization formulation is presented that is applied to various deployment scenarios, taking the computation and communication overheads into account. Our technique is demonstrated on a network of robotic sensor–actuators developed on the ROS (Robot Operating System) platform, that coordinate over the fog to complete a task. We demonstrate 77.8% latency and 54% battery usage improvements over large computation tasks, by applying this optimal offloading.

Early Internet of Things(IoT) applications have been build around cloud-centric architectures where information generated at the edge by the "things" in conveyed and processed in a cloud infrastructure. These architectures centralise processing and decision on the data-centre assuming sufficient connectivity, bandwidth and latency. As applications of the Internet of Things extend to industrial and more demanding consumer applications, the assumptions underlying cloud-centric architectures start to be violated as for several of these applications connectivity, bandwidth and latency to the data-centre are a challenge. Fog and Mist computing have emerged as forms of "Cloud Computing" closer to the "Edge" and to the "Things" that should alleviate the connectivity, bandwidth and latency challenges faced by Industrial and extremely demanding Consumer Internet of Things Applications. This keynote, will (1) introduce Cloud, Fog and Mist Computing architectures for the Internet of Things, (2) motivate their need and explain their applicability with real-world use cases, and (3) assess their technological maturity and highlight the areas that require further academic and industrial research.

Offloading computationally expensive Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) task for mobile robots have attracted significant attention during the last few years. Lack of powerful on-board compute capability in these energy constrained mobile robots and rapid advancement in compute cloud access technologies laid the foundation for development of several Cloud Robotics platforms that enabled parallel execution of computationally expensive robotic algorithms, especially involving multiple robots. In this work the Cloud Robotics concept is extended to include the current emphasis of computing at the network edge nodes along with the Cloud. The requirements and advantages of using edge nodes for computation offloading over remote cloud or local robot clusters are discussed with reference to the ETSI 'Mobile-Edge Computing' initiative and OpenFog Consortium's 'OpenFog Architecture'. A Particle Filter algorithm for SLAM is modified and implemented for offloading in a multi-tier edge+cloud setup. Additionally a model is proposed for offloading decision in such a setup with experiments and results demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed dynamic offloading scheme over static offloading strategies.