iFogSim Simulations on IoT Computational Alternatives

Abstract

This study proposes the adoption of the IoT technology for the home monitoring of the health status of frail patients. Such a solution is thought to be part of the forthcoming Italian COT; the latter is an organizational model which is devoted to integrate the current national healthcare network. The prevalent deployment model of IoT systems is the Cloud, which offers powerful services and unlimited storage/computing capacity on-demand; unfortunately, connecting smart devices to the Cloud poses severe issues. First of all, connected devices create large volumes of data, which will drive inevitably to performance and network congestion challenges. Secondly, there are security, bandwidth, and reliability concerns that make the Cloud-only solution not suitable for all the potential real-world applications. The Fog computing paradigm has been introduced to bridge the gap between the Cloud and IoT devices. This paper gives a twofold contribution: (a) a Cloud–Fog architecture is proposed using a three-tiers solution where the Fog computing layer constitutes the middle tier; (b) simulations have been carried out in order to compare Cloud–Fog computing as an alternative to the Cloud-only solution. The experimental results demonstrate a remarkable degradation of the latency in the first solution with respect to the second one. The measured benefit indicates that the best way to implement the COTs consists in placing inside them the fog layer mentioned above. The iFogSim open-source toolkit has been used to carry out the experiments.

Keywords

• Local Operational Centres (Italian name: Centrali Operative Territoriali)
• Internet of Things
• fog computing
• cloud computing
• healthcare
• home monitoring