FOCAN: A Fog-supported smart city network architecture for management of applications in the Internet of Everything environments

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2018.07.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Present a generalized multi-tiered smart city architecture utilizes FC for devices.

  • Develop an FC-supported resource allocation model to cover FNs/device components.

  • Provide various types of communications between the components.

  • Evaluate the performance of the solution for an FC platform on real datasets.

Abstract

Smart city vision brings emerging heterogeneous communication technologies such as Fog Computing (FC) together to substantially reduce the latency and energy consumption of Internet of Everything (IoE) devices running various applications. The key feature that distinguishes the FC paradigm for smart cities is that it spreads communication and computing resources over the wired/wireless access network (e.g., proximate access points and base stations) to provide resource augmentation (e.g., cyberforaging) for resource- and energy-limited wired/wireless (possibly mobile) things. Motivated by these considerations, this paper presents a Fog-supported smart city network architecture called Fog Computing Architecture Network (FOCAN), a multi-tier structure in which the applications are running on things thatjointly compute, route, and communicate with one another through the smart city environment. FOCAN decreases latency and improves energy provisioning and the efficiency of services among things with different capabilities. In particular, three types of communications are defined between FOCAN devices – interprimary, primary, and secondary communication –to manage applications in a way that meets the quality of service standards for the Internet of Everything. One of the main advantages of the proposed architecture is that the devices can provide the services with low energy usage and in an efficient manner. Simulation results for a selected case study demonstrate the tremendous impact of the FOCAN energy-efficient solution on the communication performance of various types of things in smart cities.

Introduction

The smart city concept arises from the idea of efficient use of city resources for enhancing citizens’ quality of life [16], as the pace of urban living has recently accelerated. To achieve a better quality of life, improvement of services and infrastructure in cities must be taken into account. Thanks to the revolution in information and communication technology and the power of the Internet [24], infrastructures and public services are expected to be more interactive, more accessible, and more efficient as it moves towards the realization of smart cities. In this context, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm strongly encourages utilization of the IoT’s potential to support the smart city vision around the world. As a consequence, the smart city has emerged as one of the important IoT application drivers. Smart city IoT systems promote the concept of interrelated physical objects (things) that are uniquely identified and distributed over broad physical areas covering an entire city. Recently, the IoT concept has taken an important step towards connecting four pillars –things, data, process, and even people –as the Internet of Everything (IoE). From one perspective, cities can be regarded as an aggregation of interconnected networks that make up the IoE. Hence, the IoE pillars play a significant role and work together toward the promise of our smart city vision for the future.

The IoE’s generation of Big Data (BD) over a distributed environment has the potential to create data processing as well as data storage problems. One solution to address these problems is the utilization of Cloud Computing. However, some applications cannot work efficiently on the Cloud due to its inherent problems [7]. As an example, smart city applications like health monitoring and traffic monitoring cannot tolerate the delay and latency incurred when transferring a massive amount of data to the remote Cloud Computing center and then back to the application. For this purpose, the concept of Fog Computing (FC) recently appeared. FC extends Cloud services to the edge of the network, closer to the end user, which reduces data processing time and network traffic overhead [23].

The primary definition of FC was introduced by Cisco [2]. The most fundamental entity in FC, called a Fog Node (FN), facilitates the execution of IoT applications. Basically, FC can act as an interface layer between end users/end devices and distant Cloud data centers, with the aim of satisfying mobility support, locational awareness, geodistribution, and low latency requirements for IoT applications. Since the distance between FNs and end users also varies, this paper proposes a multi-tiered framework that does not need to transfer a vast amount of data to and from remote FNs.

It saves energy and reduces delays by avoiding transferring data or using storage resources that are too far away from the FNs by choosing FNs that are closer to the end users. Our framework also attempts to answer the following questions: What is the current state of the art in the field of smart city research, specifically, in smart city components and services? What are the main challenges that need to be addressed? This article aims to shed light on these issues and to define future research directions. Specifically, in this paper the services and components engaged in smart cities should adopt emerging technologies around the following pillars: (i) It presents a generalized multi-tiered smart city architecture that utilizes FC for each device; (ii) it develops an FC-supported resource allocation model to cover device-to-device (thing-to-thing or t2t), device-to-FN (thing-to-FN or t2FN), and FN-to-FN (FN2FN) components; and (iii) the paper includes various types of communications between the components and evaluates the performance of our solution on real datasets. In summary, the most important property that distinguishes this framework from other FC-supported frameworks is the utilization of resources closer to the end users based on their layer, beginning with t2t, then t2FN, and finally FN2FN.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the most recent FC-based smart city applications and their benefits/drawbacks are studied. In Section 3, a high-level view of our smart city model is presented. Section 4 presents the FC-supported smart city architecture, its hierarchical layer definitions, and their relations to the FNs. Section 5 presents a smart city case study for the IoE-based architecture and the numerical results attained through extensive numerical tests on a simulated scheme for an FC platform (i.e., iFogSim), with details about the test setup and the formulas utilized. Section 6 describes recent issues and research directions for this problem. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper and suggests new research directions.

Section snippets

Related work

Several works have been devoted to the relation between the IoT and smart cities. For instance, the Padova smart city project [25] introduces characteristics of the Urban IoT system as well as the services that are required to support and implement the smart city vision. The work of [6] shows that it is necessary to build smart city IoT applications that have distributed coordination schemes. Increasing attention is being devoted to integrating the IoT and Cloud computing in order to generate

Model overview

This section aims to provide an overview of the proposed model in Fig. 1. The main objective of the model is to show how smart city components and services can communicate with each other and FC. To this end, the smart city is comprised of several heterogeneous components that serve numerous requests coming from various devices in order to provide these devices with the ability to access different available technologies (e.g., 3G/4G-cellular, WiFi, ZigBee). The devices are connected via the

Fog-supported smart city architecture

This section proposes an architecture for connecting the FNs and the IoE. In future smart cities, technologies will need to be applied in a distributed manner, covering each other in response to users’ real-time demands, in order to provide low-latency and high-performance computing for services. These activities will facilitate the residents’ quality of life and improve the efficiency of services to meet their needs. Applying FC as a paradigm on top of IoE systems facilitates user services and

Performance evaluation and validation

In this section, real-time-based scenarios, which are heightened in smart cities are presented.

Open issues and challenges

Academic research has developed a wide variety of techniques and technologies to capture, curate, analyze, and visualize BD. An integrated system includes network infrastructure services, education information services, and learning services. The leading benefit is that new knowledge is obtained and higher-order thinking skills are facilitated when each student generates a unique data track where data can be inserted, processed, and analyzed [20]. Today, more and more classrooms are becoming

Conclusion and future directions

Considering the thousands of smart city applications that are running on numerous things, as well as the emergence of FC to cover such applications by running at the edge of the Internet to meet the requirements of scalability, energy awareness, and low latency, a framework called FOCAN is designed for managing things’ applications. FOCAN can be classified as a computation- and communication-efficient structure and scalable routing algorithm that minimizes the average power consumption of FNs.

Acknowledgments

Mauro Conti is supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship funded by the European Commission (agreement PCIG11-GA-2012-321980). This work is also partially supported by the EU TagItSmart! Project (agreement H2020-ICT30-2015-688061), the EU-India REACH Project (agreement ICI+/2014/342-896), and by the projects “Physical-Layer Security for Wireless Communication”, “Adaptive Failure and QoS-aware Controller over Cloud Data Center to Preserve Robustness and Integrity of the Incoming Traffic”, and

Paola G. Vinueza Naranjo is currently a last year Ph.D. student in Information Communication and Telecommunication (ICT) at the Sapienza University of Rome since 2015. She received B.sc. and M.sc. degrees in Computer Science at Universidad Nacional de Chimborazo, Riobamba, Ecuador (2005–2010), respectively. Currently, she is working with two ongoing Italian projects funded by the Italian MIUR named “PRIN15” and “V-Fog” under supervision of Sapienza university of Rome. Her research interests

References (25)

  • JinJ. et al.

    An information framework for creating a smart city through internet of things

    IEEE Internet Things J.

    (2014)
  • LiY. et al.

    Exploring device-to-device communication for mobile cloud computing

  • Cited by (207)

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Paola G. Vinueza Naranjo is currently a last year Ph.D. student in Information Communication and Telecommunication (ICT) at the Sapienza University of Rome since 2015. She received B.sc. and M.sc. degrees in Computer Science at Universidad Nacional de Chimborazo, Riobamba, Ecuador (2005–2010), respectively. Currently, she is working with two ongoing Italian projects funded by the Italian MIUR named “PRIN15” and “V-Fog” under supervision of Sapienza university of Rome. Her research interests include Cloud computing, energy-saving, and Fog-based wireless systems. She is a member of IEEE Computer Society.

    Zahra Pooranian is currently a Postdoc in the SPRITZ Security and Privacy Research group at the University of Padua, Padua, Italy, since April 2017. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy, in February 2017. She received her M.sc. and B.sc. in software engineering in Dezfool Islamic Azad University, Dezfool, Iran in 2011 and 2007, respectively. She is an author/co-author of several peer-reviewed publications (h-index=12, citations=398) in well-known conferences and journals. She is an Editor of KSSI transaction on internet and information systems. Her current research focuses on Smart Grid, Smart Cities, and Grid Computing. She was a programmer in several companies in Iran from 2009–2014, respectively. She is a member of IEEE Computer Society.

    Mohammad Shojafar is an Intel Innovator, IEEE member, and senior researcher in SPRITZ Security and Privacy Research Group at the University of Padua, Italy. He was CNIT Senior Researcher at the University of Rome Tor Vergata contributed on European H2020 “SUPERFLUIDITY” project. Also, he completed some Italian projects named “SAMM- Clouds”, “V-FoG”, “PRIN15” aim to address some of the open issues related to the Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) systems In Cloud and Fog computing which are supported by the Sapienza University of Rome and University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree from Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy, in 2016 with an “Excellent” degree. He received the M.Sc. and B.Sc. in QIAU and Iran University Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2010 and 2006, respectively. He published over 88 refereed articles in prestigious venues such as IEEE TCC and IEEE TGCN, IEEE TSUSC (h-index=21, 1459+citations). He served as the Associate editor in Cluster Computing and editor in TJCA and TIIS journals. He was a programmer/analyzer at National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and Tidewater ltd. in Iran from 2008–2013, respectively.

    Mauro Conti is a Professor and Marie Curie Alumni at the University of Padua, Italy. He obtained his Ph.D. from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 2009. After his Ph.D., he was a Post-Doc Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2011 he joined as Assistant Professor the University of Padua, where he became Associate Professor in 2015. In 2017, he obtained the national habilitation as Full Professor for Computer Science and Computer Engineering. He has been Visiting Researcher at GMU (2008, 2016), UCLA (2010), UCI (2012, 2013, 2014), TU Darmstadt (2013), UF (2015), and FIU (2015, 2016). He has been awarded with a Marie Curie Fellowship (2012) by the European Commission, and with a Fellowship by the German DAAD (2013). His main research interest is in the area of security and privacy. In this area, he published more than 200 papers in topmost international peer-reviewed journals and conference. He is Associate Editor for several journals, including IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials and IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. He was Program Chair for TRUST 2015, ICISS 2016, WiSec 2017, and General Chair for SecureComm 2012 and ACM SACMAT 2013. He is Senior Member of the IEEE.

    Rajkumar Buyya is a Fellow of IEEE, Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also serving as the founding CEO of Manjrasoft, a spin-off company of the University, commercializing its innovations in Cloud Computing. He has authored over 525 publications and seven text books including “Mastering Cloud Computing” published by McGraw Hill, China Machine Press, and Morgan Kaufmann for Indian, Chinese and international markets respectively. He is one of the highly cited authors in computer science and software engineering worldwide (h-index=118, g-index=255, 73150+ citations). Software technologies for Grid and Cloud computing developed under Dr. Buyyas leadership have gained rapid acceptance and are in use at several academic institutions and commercial enterprises in 40 countries around the world. These contributions and international research leadership of Dr. Buyya are recognized through the award of “009 IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing” from the IEEE Computer Society, USA. Manjrasofts Aneka Cloud technology developed under his leadership has received 2010 Frost & Sullivan New Product Innovation Award. He served as the foundation Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. Recently, Dr. Buyya is recognized as a “Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher” in both 2016 and 2017 by Thomson Reuters, a Fellow of IEEE and Scopus Researcher of the Year 2017 with Excellence in Innovative Research Award by Elsevier for his outstanding contributions to Cloud computing.

    View full text