A Hybrid Fog-Cloud Framework for Smart Refrigerator Inventory Management

Technological advances have led to the proliferation of smart home applications, which rely on sensors. The sensors used in smart home applications generate vast amounts of data. Typically, this data gets transmitted to distant cloud data centers for analysis and storage, significantly impacting device performance and user experience. However, introducing the fog nodes at intermediate layers can alleviate the aforesaid issues by conducting most data processing operations locally and offloading only the resource-intensive tasks to the cloud. This paper proposes to showcase the efficacy of the hybrid fog-cloud-based framework for the smart refrigerator inventory management. Using a simulation tool, we evaluated the framework’s efficiency against a conventional cloud-based system. The results demonstrate the clear advantages of our proposed framework with respect to network usage, power consumption and delay.