FogRoute: DTN-Based Data Dissemination Model in Fog Computing

Fog computing, known as “cloud closed to ground,” deploys light-weight compute facility, called Fog servers, at the proximity of mobile users. By precatching contents in the Fog servers, an important application of Fog computing is to provide high-quality low-cost data distributions to proximity mobile users, e.g., video/live streaming and ads dissemination, using the single-hop low-latency wireless links. A Fog computing system is of a three tier Mobile–Fog–Cloud structure; mobile user gets service from Fog servers using local wireless connections, and Fog servers update their contents from Cloud using the cellular or wired networks. This, however, may incur high content update cost when the bandwidth between the Fog and Cloud servers is expensive, e.g., using the cellular network, and is therefore inefficient for nonurgent, high volume contents. How to economically utilize the Fog–Cloud bandwidth with guaranteed download performance of users thus represents a fundamental issue in Fog computing. In this paper, we address the issue by proposing a hybrid data dissemination framework which applies software-defined network and delay-tolerable network (DTN) approaches in Fog computing. Specifically, we decompose the Fog computing network with two planes, where the cloud is a control plane to process content update queries and organize data flows, and the geometrically distributed Fog servers form a data plane to disseminate data among Fog servers with a DTN technique. Using extensive simulations, we show that the proposed framework is efficient in terms of data-dissemination success ratio and content convergence time among Fog servers.