F2C-Aware: Enabling Discovery in Wi-Fi-Powered Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) Systems

Abstract

Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) is a novel architectural framework, driven by the needs imposed by emerging ubiquitous applications and relying on the coordinated use of fog and cloud computing. Within such a setup, a suitable mechanism addressing the resource discovery problem, taking into account fog-specific characteristics (i.e. mobility, heterogeneity, etc.) is yet to be defined. On the other hand, the proliferation of Wi-Fi has been remarkably growing with inherent support for an interesting feature set. One such feature is to embed vendorspecific information within the beacon frame in order to provide customized Wi-Fi-based informational services. In this paper, we propose F2C-Aware, a discovery approach that leverages this feature to allow devices in Wi-Fi-powered Fog-to-Cloud systems to become aware of each other. The proposed approach takes into account the fact that devices in the fog are not necessarily connected to the same local network and thus it provides discovery prior to network association, which could help in obtaining time and energy savings.