Exploiting LTE D2D communications in M2M Fog platforms: Deployment and practical issues

Fog computing is envisaged as the evolution of the current centralized cloud to support the forthcoming Internet of Things revolution. Its distributed architecture aims at providing location awareness and low-latency interactions to Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications. In this context, the LTE-Advanced technology and its evolutions are expected to play a major role as a communication infrastructure that guarantees low deployment costs, plug-and-play seamless configuration and embedded security. In this paper, we show how the LTE network can be configured to support future M2M Fog computing platforms. In particular it is shown how a network deployment that exploits Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, currently under definition within 3GPP, can be employed to support efficient communication between Fog nodes and smart objects, enabling low-latency interactions and locality-preserving multicast transmissions. The proposed deployment is presented highlighting the issues that its practical implementation raises. The advantages of the proposed approach against other alternatives are shown by means of simulation.