A Fog-Assisted Architecture to Support an Evolving Hospitality Industry in Smart Cities

In this paper, we propose a fog-assisted architecture for the hospitality industry in smart cities aimed at improving guest experience, building business insights, and increasing revenue. The proposed architecture integrates cloud services platform with the Internet of things (IoT) devices at the network edge through intermediary fog computing nodes to create an architectural paradigm with the benefits of low cost, high responsiveness, energy-efficient computing and communication, scalability, and local and global analytics. To demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of our proposed architecture for the hospitality industry, we present various use cases that can be implemented and/or enhanced by the proposed architecture. We also present a comparison of the proposed fog-assisted IoT architecture against contemporary cloud-IoT architectures in terms of average latency or timeliness. Results verify that offloading IoT tasks to fog nodes provide an improvement of 37% on average over offloading IoT tasks to cloud for the selected benchmarks. We also highlight research challenges and open research directions for fog-assisted architectures for hospitality industry.