A Context-Aware Fog Enabled Scheme for Real-Time Cross-Vertical IoT Applications

As the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is maturing, innovative, and novel services are being envisioned. An upcoming trend is the depiction of services enacted through seamless integration of multiple vertical IoT services, termed as cross-vertical or unified IoT services in this paper. Traditional Cloud-based centralized network architectures cannot cater to real-time responses demanded by such unified IoT applications. Moreover, introducing Fog nodes within the network architecture, though a promising alternative, cannot sustain the burden of a huge number of applications that culminates in massive data handling. In this paper, we envision employing lessons learned from context-aware computing, specifically context sharing among interdependent vertical IoT applications to address this delay requirement of such unified IoT applications by enacting context sharing among Fog nodes for minimizing system delay. The detailed network model and context sharing mechanism have been presented and the service time minimization has been framed as an optimization problem. Algorithms for context sharing and delay tolerant load balancing have been presented and simulation results carried out demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology.