Mobility Support for Fog Computing: An SDN Approach

Abstract

The emerging real-time and computation-intensive services driven by the Internet of Things, augmented reality, automatic driving, and so on, have tight quality of service and quality of experience requirements, which can hardly be supported by conventional cloud computing. Fog computing, which migrates the features of cloud computing to the network edge, guarantees low latency for location-aware services. However, due to the locality feature of fog computing, maintaining service continuity when mobile users travel across different access networks has become a challenging issue. In this article, we propose a novel software-defined-networking-based fog computing architecture by decoupling mobility control and data forwarding. Under the proposed architecture, we design efficient signaling operations to provide seamless and transparent mobility support to mobile users, and present an efficient route optimization algorithm by considering the performance gain in data communications and system overhead in mobile fog computing. Numerical results from extensive simulations have demonstrated that the proposed scheme can not only guarantee service continuity, but also greatly improve handover performance and achieve high data communication efficiency in mobile fog computing.