Fog Computing based Router-Distributor Application for Sustainable Smart Home

As the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained attraction, we are seeing an increase in the number of smart homes equipped with Internet-capable devices (such as smart door locks, disaster detectors, and sweeping robots). As a result of the volume of data generated by these connected devices, storage space may be limited, and network congestion can impede the regular operation of other devices. While it is possible to rely on cloud computing to meet performance requirements, some critical and deadline-oriented services require low latency (such as healthcare applications) and improves energy efficiency. As a result, fog computing has been proposed to reduce latency and network congestion, by extending the service to the terminal’s edge. To this aim, a high-performance router can be used as a fog computing node by deploying the service on it. In this paper, we have developed a data forwarding application called Router-Distributor for sustainable smart home, which simulates the fog computing environment using the iFogSim toolkit. We evaluate the performance by comparing the cloud with fog in terms of latency, network utilisation and energy consumption, which clearly shows sustainability of fog computing.