MIST: Mobility-inspired software-defined fog system

Abstract

Softwarization approaches in networks, storages, M2M, services, and smart things aim to optimize costs and processes and bring new infrastructure definitions and functional values. A recent integration of wireless and mobile cyber physical systems with the dramatically growing smart sensors enables a new type of pervasive smart and mobile urban surveillance infrastructures, which opens up new opportunities for boosting the accuracy, efficiency, and productivity of uninterrupted target tracking and situation awareness. In this paper, we present a design and prototype of a mobility-inspired efficient and effective fog system using software-defined control over a mobile and wireless environment (MIST). Fog Computing, a recently proposed extension and complement for cloud computing, enables computing at the network edge in a smart device without outsourcing jobs to a remote cloud. We investigated an effective softwarization approach in the Fog environment for dynamic big data driven, real-time urban surveillance tasks of uninterrupted target tracking. We address key technical challenges of node mobility to improve the system awareness. We have built a preliminary proof-of-concept MIST architecture on both Android and Linux based smart devices and tested various collaboration scenarios among the mobile sensors.