IoT in the Fog: A Roadmap for Data-Centric IoT Development

Our interactions with the world are increasingly dependent on context-aware services, and the future of smart cities is coupled with how efficiently and reliably we can deliver these services to end users. In this article we present the premise of personalized IoT systems, by leveraging novel advancements in user-centric technologies under the fog computing architecture. This means leveraging the connectivity and processing potential of the fog to bring IoT control and analytics closer to the user, and improve the coupling of services with local IoT components in user-centric contexts. The potential gain in access latency and context-sensitive service matching will enable a multitude of smart city services. On one hand, data management (collection, pruning, denaturing [1], and encryption) can take place closer to the edge, thereby leveraging network load and service times. On the other hand, service matching in smart city applications will witness higher responsiveness and resource visibility in areas with intermittent connectivity or high mobility. We first present the challenges in migrating cloud-IoT architectures to the network edge, and detail the hindrances in transitioning the control and management of IoT systems to the user end. As a remedy, we survey recent advancements in the IoT, ubiquitous computing, and user-centric services, which enable us to advance personalized IoT architectures. We finally present a framework for IoT in the fog to synergize these advancements, and present a proof-of-concept use case to highlight its utility and impact. We conclude this article with prime directions for future work to realize a personalized IoT architecture, and highlight the potential gain in prioritizing five high-yield potential research issues.