Fog-Enabled Smart Campus: Architecture and Challenges

In recent years, much attention has been paid on the design and realization of smart campus, which is a miniature smart city paradigm consisting of its unique infrastructures, facilities, and services. Realizing the full vision of smart campus needs an instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent cyber physical system leveraging ICTs and physical infrastructures in the campus. Moreover, the study of a smart campus could pave a way for studying smart cities. In a smart campus, heterogeneous big data is continuously generated by the different functional sensing devices. This poses great challenges on the computation, transmission, storage, and energy consumption of traditional sensor-to-cloud continuum, which typically incurs huge amount of network transmission, high energy consumption, and long (sometimes intolerable) processing delay. Based on these observations, we propose a fog-enabled smart campus to enhance the real-time service provisioning. An architecture of smart campus is put forward, in which multiple fog nodes are deployed to guarantee the real-time performance of services and applications by performing tasks at the network edge. Furthermore, a lot of open research issues regarding to this architecture are discussed in hope to inspire to expand more research activities in this field.