Fog Computing Approach for Mobility Support in Internet-of-Things Systems

Abstract

Handover mechanism for mobility support in a remote real-time streaming Internet-of-Things (IoT) system was proposed in this paper. The handover mechanism serves to keep the connection between sensor nodes and a gateway with a low latency. The handover mechanism also attentively considers oscillating nodes which often occur in many streaming IoT systems. By leveraging the strategic position of smart gateways and Fog computing in a real-time streaming IoT system, sensor nodes’ loads were alleviated whereas advanced services, like push notification and local data storage, were provided. The paper discussed and analyzed metrics for the handover mechanism based on Wi-Fi. In addition, a complete remote real-time health monitoring IoT system was implemented for experiments. The results from evaluating our mobility handover mechanism for mobility support shows that the latency of switching from one gateway to another is 10%–50% less than other state-of-the-art mobility support systems. The results show that the proposed handover mechanism is a very promising approach for mobility support in both Fog computing and IoT systems.