Find my trustworthy fogs: A fuzzy-based trust evaluation framework

Abstract

The growth of IoT is proven with the massive amount of data generated in 2015, and is expected to be even more in the years to come. Relying on the cloud to meet the expanding volume, variety, and velocity of data that the IoT generates may not be feasible. In the last two years, fog computing has become a considerably important research topic in an attempt to reduce the burden on cloud and solve cloud’s inability to meet the IoT latency requirement. However, fog environment is different than in cloud since fog environment is far more distributed. Due to the dynamic nature of fog, backups such as redundant power supply would deem unnecessary, and relying on just one Internet Service Provider for their fog device would be sufficient. If obstacles arise in this fog environment, factors such as latency, availability or reliability would in turn be unstable. Fogs become harder to trust, and this issue is more complicated and challenging in comparison to the conventional cloud. This implies that trustworthiness in fog is an imperative issue that needs to be addressed. With the help of a broker, managing trust in a distributive environment can be tackled. Acting as an intermediary, a broker helps in facilitating negotiation between two parties. Although the brokering concept has been around for a long time and is widely used in the cloud, it is a new concept in fog computing. As of late, there are several research studies that incorporates broker in fog where these brokers focus towards pricing management. However to the best of our knowledge there is no literature on broker-based trust evaluation in fog service allocation. This is the first work that proposes broker-based trust evaluation framework that focuses on identifying a trustworthy fog to fulfill the user requests. In this paper, fuzzy logic is used as the basis for the evaluation while considering the availability and cost of fog. We propose Request Matching algorithm to identify a user request, and Fuzzy-based Filtering algorithm to match the request with one of the predefined sets created and managed by the broker. In this paper, we present a use case that illustrates how fuzzy logic works in determining the trustworthiness of a fog. Our findings suggest that the algorithms can successfully provide users a trustworthy fog that matches their requirement.