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Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Internet of Things".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 May 2019) | Viewed by 53235

Special Issue Editors

1. Institute of Information Systems, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO), 3960 Sierre, Switzerland
2. HOP Ubiquitous S.L. (Libelium Murcia), Ceutí 30562, Spain
Interests: Internet of Things; security; smart cities
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
ETSI Informatica y Telecomunicaciones, Boulevard Louis Pasteur, 35 Teatinos Campus, 29071 Málaga, Spain
Interests: Internet of Things; security; edge computing; Industry 4.0; security architectures
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid growth of mobile applications and the Internet of Things have placed severe demands on cloud infrastructure, which has led to moving computing and data services towards the edge of the cloud, inside the so-called “edge computing”. There are multiple instantiations of this concept, such as “fog computing” and “multi-access edge computing”.

This Special Issue solicits papers that cover numerous topics of interest that include, but are not limited to:

  • Integrated communication and computing design for fog/edge computing-based IoT
  • Theoretical foundation and models for fog/edge computing-based IoT
  • Intelligent (real time) data analytics for fog/edge computing-based IoT
  • Security and privacy in fog/edge computing-based IoT
  • Machine learning for fog/edge computing-based IoT
  • Communication and network architecture and protocols for fog/edge computing-based IoT
  • Data management, decision support and novel services in fog/edge computing-based IoT
  • Integrated testbed and case studies for fog/edge computing-based IoT
Dr. Antonio J. Jara
Prof. Dr. Houbing Song
Dr. Rodrigo Román-Castro
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (10 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 703 KiB  
Article
A Micro-Level Compensation-Based Cost Model for Resource Allocation in a Fog Environment
by Sudheer Kumar Battula, Saurabh Garg, Ranesh Kumar Naha, Parimala Thulasiraman and Ruppa Thulasiram
Sensors 2019, 19(13), 2954; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19132954 - 04 Jul 2019
Cited by 22 | Viewed by 4980
Abstract
Fog computing aims to support applications requiring low latency and high scalability by using resources at the edge level. In general, fog computing comprises several autonomous mobile or static devices that share their idle resources to run different services. The providers of these [...] Read more.
Fog computing aims to support applications requiring low latency and high scalability by using resources at the edge level. In general, fog computing comprises several autonomous mobile or static devices that share their idle resources to run different services. The providers of these devices also need to be compensated based on their device usage. In any fog-based resource-allocation problem, both cost and performance need to be considered for generating an efficient resource-allocation plan. Estimating the cost of using fog devices prior to the resource allocation helps to minimize the cost and maximize the performance of the system. In the fog computing domain, recent research works have proposed various resource-allocation algorithms without considering the compensation to resource providers and the cost estimation of the fog resources. Moreover, the existing cost models in similar paradigms such as in the cloud are not suitable for fog environments as the scaling of different autonomous resources with heterogeneity and variety of offerings is much more complicated. To fill this gap, this study first proposes a micro-level compensation cost model and then proposes a new resource-allocation method based on the cost model, which benefits both providers and users. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm ensures better resource-allocation performance and lowers application processing costs when compared to the existing best-fit algorithm. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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18 pages, 3977 KiB  
Article
Data-Driven Automated Cardiac Health Management with Robust Edge Analytics and De-Risking
by Arijit Ukil, Antonio J. Jara and Leandro Marin
Sensors 2019, 19(12), 2733; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19122733 - 18 Jun 2019
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3046
Abstract
Remote and automated healthcare management has shown the prospective to significantly impact the future of human prognosis rate. Internet of Things (IoT) enables the development and implementation ecosystem to cater the need of large number of relevant stakeholders. In this paper, we consider [...] Read more.
Remote and automated healthcare management has shown the prospective to significantly impact the future of human prognosis rate. Internet of Things (IoT) enables the development and implementation ecosystem to cater the need of large number of relevant stakeholders. In this paper, we consider the cardiac health management system to demonstrate that data-driven techniques produce substantial performance merits in terms of clinical efficacy by employing robust machine learning methods with relevant and selected signal processing features. We consider phonocardiogram (PCG) or heart sound as the exemplary physiological signal. PCG carries substantial cardiac health signature to establish our claim of data-centric superior clinical utility. Our method demonstrates close to 85% accuracy on publicly available MIT-Physionet PCG datasets and outperform relevant state-of-the-art algorithm. Due to its simpler computational architecture of shallow classifier with just three features, the proposed analytics method is performed at edge gateway. However, it is to be noted that healthcare analytics deal with number of sensitive data and subsequent inferences, which need privacy protection. Additionally, the problem of healthcare data privacy prevention is addressed by de-risking of sensitive data management using differential privacy, such that controlled privacy protection on sensitive healthcare data can be enabled. When a user sets for privacy protection, appropriate privacy preservation is guaranteed for defense against privacy-breaching knowledge mining attacks. In this era of IoT and machine intelligence, this work is of practical importance, which enables on-demand automated screening of cardiac health under minimizing the privacy breaching risk. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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20 pages, 1784 KiB  
Article
On the Location of Fog Nodes in Fog-Cloud Infrastructures
by Rodrigo A. C. da Silva and Nelson L. S. da Fonseca
Sensors 2019, 19(11), 2445; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19112445 - 29 May 2019
Cited by 37 | Viewed by 3826
Abstract
In the fog computing paradigm, fog nodes are placed on the network edge to meet end-user demands with low latency, providing the possibility of new applications. Although the role of the cloud remains unchanged, a new network infrastructure for fog nodes must be [...] Read more.
In the fog computing paradigm, fog nodes are placed on the network edge to meet end-user demands with low latency, providing the possibility of new applications. Although the role of the cloud remains unchanged, a new network infrastructure for fog nodes must be created. The design of such an infrastructure must consider user mobility, which causes variations in workload demand over time in different regions. Properly deciding on the location of fog nodes is important to reduce the costs associated with their deployment and maintenance. To meet these demands, this paper discusses the problem of locating fog nodes and proposes a solution which considers time-varying demands, with two classes of workload in terms of latency. The solution was modeled as a mixed-integer linear programming formulation with multiple criteria. An evaluation with real data showed that an improvement in end-user service can be obtained in conjunction with the minimization of the costs by deploying fewer servers in the infrastructure. Furthermore, results show that costs can be further reduced if a limited blocking of requests is tolerated. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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16 pages, 2429 KiB  
Article
Methods of Resource Scheduling Based on Optimized Fuzzy Clustering in Fog Computing
by Guangshun Li, Yuncui Liu, Junhua Wu, Dandan Lin and Shuaishuai Zhao
Sensors 2019, 19(9), 2122; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19092122 - 08 May 2019
Cited by 86 | Viewed by 5121
Abstract
Cloud computing technology is widely used at present. However, cloud computing servers are far from terminal users, which may lead to high service request delays and low user satisfaction. As a new computing architecture, fog computing is an extension of cloud computing that [...] Read more.
Cloud computing technology is widely used at present. However, cloud computing servers are far from terminal users, which may lead to high service request delays and low user satisfaction. As a new computing architecture, fog computing is an extension of cloud computing that can effectively solve the aforementioned problems. Resource scheduling is one of the key technologies in fog computing. We propose a resource scheduling method for fog computing in this paper. First, we standardize and normalize the resource attributes. Second, we combine the methods of fuzzy clustering with particle swarm optimization to divide the resources, and the scale of the resource search is reduced. Finally, we propose a new resource scheduling algorithm based on optimized fuzzy clustering. The experimental results show that our method can improve user satisfaction and the efficiency of resource scheduling. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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19 pages, 455 KiB  
Article
On the Combination of Multi-Cloud and Network Coding for Cost-Efficient Storage in Industrial Applications
by Goiuri Peralta, Pablo Garrido, Josu Bilbao, Ramón Agüero and Pedro M. Crespo
Sensors 2019, 19(7), 1673; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19071673 - 08 Apr 2019
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4018
Abstract
The adoption of both Cyber–Physical Systems (CPSs) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has enabled the evolution towards the so-called Industry 4.0. These technologies, together with cloud computing and artificial intelligence, foster new business opportunities. Besides, several industrial applications need immediate decision making and fog [...] Read more.
The adoption of both Cyber–Physical Systems (CPSs) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has enabled the evolution towards the so-called Industry 4.0. These technologies, together with cloud computing and artificial intelligence, foster new business opportunities. Besides, several industrial applications need immediate decision making and fog computing is emerging as a promising solution to address such requirement. In order to achieve a cost-efficient system, we propose taking advantage from spot instances, a new service offered by cloud providers, which provide resources at lower prices. The main downside of these instances is that they do not ensure service continuity and they might suffer from interruptions. An architecture that combines fog and multi-cloud deployments along with Network Coding (NC) techniques, guarantees the needed fault-tolerance for the cloud environment, and also reduces the required amount of redundant data to provide reliable services. In this paper we analyze how NC can actually help to reduce the storage cost and improve the resource efficiency for industrial applications, based on a multi-cloud infrastructure. The cost analysis has been carried out using both real AWS EC2 spot instance prices and, to complement them, prices obtained from a model based on a finite Markov chain, derived from real measurements. We have analyzed the overall system cost, depending on different parameters, showing that configurations that seek to minimize the storage yield a higher cost reduction, due to the strong impact of storage cost. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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29 pages, 1076 KiB  
Article
Improving Quality-of-Service in Cloud/Fog Computing through Efficient Resource Allocation
by Samson Busuyi Akintoye and Antoine Bagula
Sensors 2019, 19(6), 1267; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19061267 - 13 Mar 2019
Cited by 37 | Viewed by 4984
Abstract
Recently, a massive migration of enterprise applications to the cloud has been recorded in the IT world. One of the challenges of cloud computing is Quality-of-Service management, which includes the adoption of appropriate methods for allocating cloud-user applications to virtual resources, and virtual [...] Read more.
Recently, a massive migration of enterprise applications to the cloud has been recorded in the IT world. One of the challenges of cloud computing is Quality-of-Service management, which includes the adoption of appropriate methods for allocating cloud-user applications to virtual resources, and virtual resources to the physical resources. The effective allocation of resources in cloud data centers is also one of the vital optimization problems in cloud computing, particularly when the cloud service infrastructures are built by lightweight computing devices. In this paper, we formulate and present the task allocation and virtual machine placement problems in a single cloud/fog computing environment, and propose a task allocation algorithmic solution and a Genetic Algorithm Based Virtual Machine Placement as solutions for the task allocation and virtual machine placement problem models. Finally, the experiments are carried out and the results show that the proposed solutions improve Quality-of-Service in the cloud/fog computing environment in terms of the allocation cost. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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19 pages, 455 KiB  
Article
Energy-Efficient Collaborative Task Computation Offloading in Cloud-Assisted Edge Computing for IoT Sensors
by Fagui Liu, Zhenxi Huang and Liangming Wang
Sensors 2019, 19(5), 1105; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19051105 - 04 Mar 2019
Cited by 56 | Viewed by 5987
Abstract
As an emerging and promising computing paradigm in the Internet of things (IoT), edge computing can significantly reduce energy consumption and enhance computation capability for resource-constrained IoT devices. Computation offloading has recently received considerable attention in edge computing. Many existing studies have investigated [...] Read more.
As an emerging and promising computing paradigm in the Internet of things (IoT), edge computing can significantly reduce energy consumption and enhance computation capability for resource-constrained IoT devices. Computation offloading has recently received considerable attention in edge computing. Many existing studies have investigated the computation offloading problem with independent computing tasks. However, due to the inter-task dependency in various devices that commonly happens in IoT systems, achieving energy-efficient computation offloading decisions remains a challengeable problem. In this paper, a cloud-assisted edge computing framework with a three-tier network in an IoT environment is introduced. In this framework, we first formulated an energy consumption minimization problem as a mixed integer programming problem considering two constraints, the task-dependency requirement and the completion time deadline of the IoT service. To address this problem, we then proposed an Energy-efficient Collaborative Task Computation Offloading (ECTCO) algorithm based on a semidefinite relaxation and stochastic mapping approach to obtain strategies of tasks computation offloading for IoT sensors. Simulation results demonstrated that the cloud-assisted edge computing framework was feasible and the proposed ECTCO algorithm could effectively reduce the energy cost of IoT sensors. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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18 pages, 2623 KiB  
Article
Task Scheduling Based on a Hybrid Heuristic Algorithm for Smart Production Line with Fog Computing
by Juan Wang and Di Li
Sensors 2019, 19(5), 1023; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19051023 - 28 Feb 2019
Cited by 97 | Viewed by 6941
Abstract
Fog computing provides computation, storage and network services for smart manufacturing. However, in a smart factory, the task requests, terminal devices and fog nodes have very strong heterogeneity, such as the different task characteristics of terminal equipment: fault detection tasks have high real-time [...] Read more.
Fog computing provides computation, storage and network services for smart manufacturing. However, in a smart factory, the task requests, terminal devices and fog nodes have very strong heterogeneity, such as the different task characteristics of terminal equipment: fault detection tasks have high real-time demands; production scheduling tasks require a large amount of calculation; inventory management tasks require a vast amount of storage space, and so on. In addition, the fog nodes have different processing abilities, such that strong fog nodes with considerable computing resources can help terminal equipment to complete the complex task processing, such as manufacturing inspection, fault detection, state analysis of devices, and so on. In this setting, a new problem has appeared, that is, determining how to perform task scheduling among the different fog nodes to minimize the delay and energy consumption as well as improve the smart manufacturing performance metrics, such as production efficiency, product quality and equipment utilization rate. Therefore, this paper studies the task scheduling strategy in the fog computing scenario. A task scheduling strategy based on a hybrid heuristic (HH) algorithm is proposed that mainly solves the problem of terminal devices with limited computing resources and high energy consumption and makes the scheme feasible for real-time and efficient processing tasks of terminal devices. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed strategy achieves superior performance compared to other strategies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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23 pages, 4320 KiB  
Article
Joint Optimization for Task Offloading in Edge Computing: An Evolutionary Game Approach
by Chongwu Dong and Wushao Wen
Sensors 2019, 19(3), 740; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19030740 - 12 Feb 2019
Cited by 39 | Viewed by 6952
Abstract
The mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm provides a promising solution to solve the resource-insufficiency problem in mobile terminals by offloading computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks to nearby edge nodes. However, limited computation resources in edge nodes may not be sufficient to serve excessive offloading [...] Read more.
The mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm provides a promising solution to solve the resource-insufficiency problem in mobile terminals by offloading computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks to nearby edge nodes. However, limited computation resources in edge nodes may not be sufficient to serve excessive offloading tasks exceeding the computation capacities of edge nodes. Therefore, multiple edge clouds with a complementary central cloud coordinated to serve users is the efficient architecture to satisfy users’ Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements while trying to minimize some network service providers’ cost. We study a dynamic, decentralized resource-allocation strategy based on evolutionary game theory to deal with task offloading to multiple heterogeneous edge nodes and central clouds among multi-users. In our strategy, the resource competition among multi-users is modeled by the process of replicator dynamics. During the process, our strategy can achieve one evolutionary equilibrium, meeting users’ QoS requirements under resource constraints of edge nodes. The stability and fairness of this strategy is also proved by mathematical analysis. Illustrative studies show the effectiveness of our proposed strategy, outperforming other alternative methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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14 pages, 1674 KiB  
Article
Adaptive Computing Optimization in Software-Defined Network-Based Industrial Internet of Things with Fog Computing
by Juan Wang and Di Li
Sensors 2018, 18(8), 2509; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18082509 - 01 Aug 2018
Cited by 36 | Viewed by 4821
Abstract
In recent years, cloud computing and fog computing have appeared one after the other, as promising technologies for augmenting the computing capability of devices locally. By offloading computational tasks to fog servers or cloud servers, the time for task processing decreases greatly. Thus, [...] Read more.
In recent years, cloud computing and fog computing have appeared one after the other, as promising technologies for augmenting the computing capability of devices locally. By offloading computational tasks to fog servers or cloud servers, the time for task processing decreases greatly. Thus, to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) of smart manufacturing systems, fog servers are deployed at network edge to provide fog computing services. In this paper, we study the following problems in a mixed computing system: (1) which computing mode should be chosen for a task in local computing, fog computing or cloud computing? (2) In the fog computing mode, what is the execution sequence for the tasks cached in a task queue? Thus, to solve the problems above, we design a Software-Defined Network (SDN) framework in a smart factory based on an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) system. A method based on Computing Mode Selection (CMS) and execution sequences based on the task priority (ASTP) is proposed in this paper. First, a CMS module is designed in the SDN controller and then, after operating the CMS algorithm, each task obtains an optimal computing mode. Second, the task priorities can be calculated according to their real-time performance and calculated amount. According to the task priority, the SDN controller sends a flow table to the SDN switch to complete the task transmission. In other words, the higher the task priority is, the earlier the fog computing service is obtained. Finally, a series of experiments and simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that our method can achieve real-time performance and high reliability in IIoT. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Fog/Edge Computing in Internet of Things)
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