Characterization and Modeling of IoT Data Traffic in the Fog of Things Paradigm

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows for the communication of a large number of physical or virtual objects through different technologies, protocols and patterns. Several organizations have tried to predict the number of IoT devices that will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Although they have not yet to agree on an exact `magical' number of such devices (in billions), we can expect this huge number of devices to be active which may pose several challenges regarding connectivity and information exchange over network infrastructures. And despite the fact that Cloud and Fog computing addresses some of these challenges, it can also create other problems due to the high demand for storage as well as high network traffic at the edge level. In this paper, we model the IoT data traffic in order to execute several experiments related to the demand for storage and network traffic. As a consequence, the results of our experiments, which have been validated in a modeling based on the Fog of Things paradigm, can be used to evaluate the impact that variation in IoT data traffic patterns has on IoT/Fog environments.