Hierarchical and Autonomous Fog Architecture

Cloud computing paradigm stops short in its offerings towards deployment of latency-critical and bandwidth-intensive applications. Fog computing paradigm emerged as a promising solution to realize deployment of large scale IoT environments and low latency real-time services, leveraging large number of resource-constrained, heterogeneous fog nodes distributed across vast geographical areas and located closer to users and data sources, as compared to core cloud which is usually located at large data centers, far from users and IoT devices. To facilitate efficient deployment of services on the fog infrastructure, we propose Hierarchical and Autonomous Fog Architecture (HAFA) to organize heterogeneous fog nodes into a multi-layered connected hierarchy based on several parameters such as physical location, distance from IoT devices and/or users, node resource configuration, privacy and security. Fog nodes are grouped to facilitate resource pooling and local control, and groups of fog nodes are linked to facilitate disaster readiness and autonomy. HAFA helps reducing effort in finding an optimal node with required resource characteristics towards service deployment.