An energy-efficient model for fog computing in the Internet of Things (IoT)

Abstract

A huge number of devices like sensors in addition to computers are interconnected in the IoT (Internet of Things). In the cloud computing model, sensor data is transmitted to servers in networks and processed on the servers in a cloud. Here, networks are congested and servers are overloaded due to heavy traffic from sensors. In order to reduce the delay time and network traffic and increase the performance of the system, data and processes are distributed to not only servers in a cloud but also fog nodes in fog computing models. While the traffic of servers in a cloud can be reduced, the total electric energy consumed by fog nodes increases to process sensor data. In this paper, we newly propose a tree-based fog computing (TBFC) model to distribute processes and data to servers and fog nodes so that the total electric energy consumption of nodes can be reduced in the IoT. In the evaluation, we show the total electric energy consumption of nodes in the TBFC model is smaller than the cloud computing model.