Matching IoT Devices to the Fog Service Providers: A Mechanism Design Perspective.

Anjan Bandyopadhyay,Vikash Kumar Singh,Sajal Mukhopadhyay,Paul Krause,Ujjwal Rai,Fatos Xhafa

doi:10.3390/s20236761

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) + Fog + Cloud architecture, with the unprecedented growth of IoT devices, one of the challenging issues that needs to be tackled is to allocate Fog service providers (FSPs) to IoT devices, especially in a game-theoretic environment. Here, the issue of allocation of FSPs to the IoT devices is sifted with game-theoretic idea so that utility maximizing agents may be benign. In this scenario, we have multiple IoT devices and multiple FSPs, and the IoT devices give preference ordering over the subset of FSPs. Given such a scenario, the goal is to allocate at most one FSP to each of the IoT devices. We propose mechanisms based on the theory of mechanism design without money to allocate FSPs to the IoT devices. The proposed mechanisms have been designed in a flexible manner to address the long and short duration access of the FSPs to the IoT devices. For analytical results, we have proved the economic robustness, and probabilistic analyses have been carried out for allocation of IoT devices to the FSPs. In simulation, mechanism efficiency is laid out under different scenarios with an implementation in Python.

Highlights

With the the ever-increasing growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices across the globe [1] (CISCO has put forward a figure that shows we could have 50 billions devices ready to be linked by the year with multiple devices belonging to a person on average [2]); vast amounts of data are to be stacked and handled
We prove that Modified Truthful Mechanism for Fog Service Allocation (MTM-FSA) possesses some interesting economic properties such as truthfulness and Pareto optimality, in Theorem 3 and Theorem 4, respectively
Considering the first case, Truthful Mechanism for Fog Service Allocation (TM-FSA) is compared with the carefully crafted benchmark mechanism called Random Mechanism for Fog Service Allocation (RM-FSA) that is non-truthful in nature

Summary

Introduction

With the the ever-increasing growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices across the globe [1] (CISCO has put forward a figure that shows we could have 50 billions devices ready to be linked by the year with multiple devices belonging to a person on average [2]); vast amounts of data are to be stacked and handled. One of the plausible advantages is managing the huge amount of data generated from sensors and other devices in an efficient and effective manner. These huge amounts of data that are stored in the Cloud are analyzed, and decisions are taken in many real-life scenarios such as telemedicine and patient care. Sending such a huge amount of data to the Cloud and retrieving them back requires an excessively high network bandwidth.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion