Virtual Fog: A Virtualization Enabled Fog Computing Framework for Internet of Things

The prosperity of Internet of Things (IoT) and the success of rich Cloud services have expedited the emergence of a new computing paradigm called Fog computing, which promotes the processing of data at the proximity of their sources. Complementary to the Cloud, Fog promises to offer many appealing features, such as low latency, low cost, high multitenancy, high scalability, and to consolidate the IoT ecosystem. Although the Fog concept has been widely adopted in many areas, a comprehensive realization has yet been adequately researched. To address all these issues, in this paper, object virtualization is investigated to overcome obstacles resulting from resource constraints on sensory-level nodes while service virtualization is explored to easily create tailored applications for end users. Moreover, network function virtualization is studied to perform the flexibility of network service provisioning. Grounded on object virtualization, network function virtualization and service virtualization, a layered framework that encompasses smart objects, Fog and Cloud is presented to illustrate the realization of virtual Fog along IoT continuum. This proposed virtual Fog framework is applied to a smart living case for verification, then quantitative analysis is conducted to demonstrate the low latency, low operating expense, high multitenancy and scalability, followed by an experimental evaluation to further confirm that delay and jitter can be decreased through virtualization.