A Cloud to the Ground: The New Frontier of Intelligent and Autonomous Networks of Things

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm is supporting -and will support- an ever-increasing number of services and applications impacting on almost every aspect of our everyday life. The current trend is forecasting IoT to connect tens of billion objects by 2020 yielding a very-high volume of data to be acquired, transmitted and processed. IoT typically relies on Cloud Computing to process, analyze and store the data acquired by IoT entities. Unfortunately, the need to transmit all data from the informationproducing objects to the Cloud for a subsequent processing/analysis phase would require a large bandwidth and increase the latency in the “decision-making process” whenever decisions/reactions must be promptly taken by the IoT units. The Fog Computing (FC) paradigm aims at addressing these problems by extending Cloud Computing towards the edge of the network. In this direction, this paper introduces a novel FC-IoT paradigm designed to move computing, storage and applications/services close to IoT objects so as to reduce communication bandwidth and energy consumption as well as “decision-making” latency. The proposed IoT-based solution has been designed to have intelligent and autonomous IoT objects that are integrated with a FC and Fog Networking approach. The distinguishing features of the intelligent FC-IoT platform are low-latency, self-adaptation, low energy consumption and spectrum efficiency.