A Volunteer-Supported Fog Computing Environment for Delay-Sensitive IoT Applications

Fog computing (FC) has emerged as a complementary solution to the centralized cloud infrastructure. An FC node is available in closer proximity to users and extends cloud services to the edge of the network in a highly distributed manner. However, with an increase in streaming and delay-sensitive Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, FC also needs to address the issue of higher latency while forwarding compute-intensive jobs to remote cloud data centers. Hence, there is a need to investigate the use of computational resources at the edge of the network. Volunteer computing (VC) offers a reduction in the cost of maintaining high-performance computing by making use of user-owned underutilized or idle resources, e.g., laptops and desktop computers closer to fog devices. We propose volunteer-supported FC (VSFC), as a computing paradigm, that explores the interplay of these two distributed computing domains to help minimize inherent communication delays of cloud computing, energy consumption, and network usage. To this effect, we have extended the iFogSim toolkit to support VSFC. Extensive simulations show that VSFC outperforms traditional FC-cloud computing by reducing delay by 47.5%, energy by 93%, and network usage by 92% under normal to heavy load conditions.