Fog Computing Framework for Smart City Design

Abstract

Fog-computing is a new network architecture and computing paradigm that uses user or near-users devices (network edge) to carry out some processing tasks. Accordingly, it extends the cloud computing with more flexibility the one found in the ubiquitous networks. A smart city based on the concept of fog-computing with flexible hierarchy is proposed in this paper. The aim of the proposed design is to overcome the limitations of the previous approaches, which depends on using various network architectures, such as cloud-computing, autonomic network architecture and ubiquitous network architecture. Accordingly, the proposed approach achieves a reduction of the latency of data processing and transmission with enabled real-time applications, distribute the processing tasks over edge devices in order to reduce the cost of data processing and allow collaborative data exchange among the applications of the smart city. The design is made up of five major layers, which can be increased or merged according to the amount of data processing and transmission in each application. The involved layers are connection layer, real-time processing layer, neighborhood linking layer, main-processing layer, data server layer. A case study of a novel smart public car parking, traveling and direction advisor is implemented using IFogSim and the results showed that reduce the delay of real-time application significantly, reduce the cost and network usage compared to the cloud-computing paradigm. Moreover, the proposed approach, although, it increases the scalability and reliability of the users’ access, it does not sacrifice much time, nor cost and network usage compared to fixed fog-computing design.