Ricerc@Sapienza

Cloud providers are today enriching their services to support smart Internet of connected objects, or Things (IoT), e.g., the IBM's Watson IoT platform or the Amazon's IoT service. This cloud only solutions already provide valuable supports to connected objects. However, meeting the demand of real-time computation power, that will be generated by the estimated billions of smart objects deployed in the near future, may require to make some structural architectural changes to this cloud-only paradigm.

Fog Computing is considered a key enabler for scenarios where such centralized cloud-based platforms are impractical. Fog computing is a hierarchical networked system paradigm, in which computation and storage resources are placed in proximity to IoT devices.
Fog computing is not intended to replace the current cloud-only architecture, but rather to complement it and improve the computation response time. The fog layer acts as an intermediary layer between the end user and the cloud layer, with the goal of processing user requests locally thus reducing the need of cloud services. Accordingly, a key measure of a well designed Fog architecture is the fraction of computations that can be executed directly in the Fog layer, i.e., without the cloud service, that should be as high as possible.

To achieve this goal, cooperation among fog providers or among fog nodes of the same provider is considered a required feature. Enabling inter-provider collaboration, however, is a multi-facet problem as issues concerning privacy, incentive to cooperate, designing distributed cooperating algorithms have to be addressed globally. The aim of this research project is to focus on this problem of cooperation among competitive fog providers, and has the following two objectives:

Objective 1. Understanding and quantify the benefit of cooperation among fog providers.
Objective 2. Propose and evaluate distributed and secure cooperation algorithms.