FOCAN: A Fog-supported Smart City Network Architecture for Management of Applications in the Internet of Everything Environments

摘要

Smart city vision brings emerging heterogeneous communication technologiessuch as Fog Computing (FC) together to substantially reduce the latency andenergy consumption of Internet of Everything (IoE) devices running variousapplications. The key feature that distinguishes the FC paradigm for smartcities is that it spreads communication and computing resources over thewired/wireless access network (e.g., proximate access points and base stations)to provide resource augmentation (e.g., cyberforaging) for resource andenergy-limited wired/wireless (possibly mobile) things. Moreover, smart cityapplications are developed with the goal of improving the management of urbanflows and allowing real-time responses to challenges that can arise in users'transactional relationships. This article presents a Fog-supported smart citynetwork architecture called Fog Computing Architecture Network (FOCAN), amulti-tier structure in which the applications running on things jointlycompute, route, and communicate with one another through the smart cityenvironment to decrease latency and improve energy provisioning and theefficiency of services among things with different capabilities. An importantconcern that arises with the introduction of FOCAN is the need to avoidtransferring data to/from distant things and instead to cover the nearestregion for an IoT application. We define three types of communications betweenFOCAN devices (e.g., interprimary, primary, and secondary communication) tomanage applications in a way that meets the quality of service standards forthe IoE. One of the main advantages of FOCAN is that the devices can providethe services with low energy usage and in an efficient manner. Simulationresults for a selected case study demonstrate the tremendous impact of theFOCAN energy-efficient solution on the communication performance of varioustypes of things in smart cities.