Reliability provisioning for Fog Nodes in Smart Farming IoT-Fog-Cloud continuum

Reliability is essential in Smart Farming supported by the IoT-Fog-Cloud continuum. Smart Farms' unprotection may cause significant economic losses and low yields of production. This paper introduces an optimization model for providing reliability and, consequently, service continuity to the IoT-Fog-Cloud continuum-based smart farms. The proposed model allows Smart Farming stakeholders to find the optimal number of Fog Nodes needed to deploy farming services considering the heterogeneity in the fog capabilities, resource demands, redundancy techniques, and reliability requirements. The model was solved using linear programming and evaluated with different demands and protection schemes. Results show that protection schemes guarantee high reliability and reveal that a shared redundancy scheme reduces deployment cost and yet provides reliability. Results also indicate that deployment costs and resources depend on the type of fog-based smart farm services to serve. Moreover, they show that deploying more low-resource hardware can be less expensive for low-reliability demands than deploying with a few high-resource hardware.