Towards Dynamic Fog Resource Provisioning for Smart City Applications

Over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed the Smart City concept into an attractive and relevant opportunity. Smart Cities aim to connect billions of objects of everyday life to the Internet to improve sustainability and citizen welfare. Fog Computing has been introduced to provide scalable and low latency services for the future IoT use cases by placing cloud resources at the edges of the network. Nevertheless, crucial challenges still remain in the Fog Computing domain. One of them is providing proper resource provisioning while reducing allocation costs, maximizing energy efficiency and minimizing latency. Therefore, in this paper, a novel Resource Discovery Service based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) is presented to enable automated resource discovery functionalities for IoT services. The proposed approach provides a flexible way of exchanging resource allocation information between the Fog and the Cloud Layer. Evaluations have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of implementing information dissemination systems based on DHTs. Performance ratios higher than 99%, including latencies under 0.7 seconds for a static context have been obtained. Results show that DHTs provide scalable discovery solutions showing the full applicability of the proposed approach in the Smart City environment.