IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2017 - 74

IFCIoT:
Integrated
Fog Cloud IoT
A novel architectural paradigm
for the future Internet of Things.
By Arslan Munir, Prasanna Kansakar, and Samee U. Khan

he Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of
physical things, objects, or devices, such as radio-frequency identification tags, sensors, actuators, mobile
phones, and laptops. The IoT enables objects to be
sensed and controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, including the Internet, thereby creating
opportunities for more direct integration of the physical
world into the cyber world. The IoT becomes an instance of
cyberphysical systems (CPSs) with the incorporation of sensors and actuators in IoT devices. Objects in the IoT have the
potential to be grouped into geographical or logical clusters.
Various IoT clusters generate huge amounts of data from
diverse locations, which creates the need to process these
data more efficiently. Efficient processing of these data can
involve a combination of different computation models, such
as in situ processing and offloading to surrogate devices and
cloud-data centers.
Cloud computing is an Internet-based computing paradigm
that provides ubiquitous and on-demand access to a shared pool
of configurable resources (e.g., processors, storage, services,
and applications) to other computers or devices. Although the
cloud-computing paradigm is able to handle huge amounts of
data from IoT clusters, the transfer of enormous amounts of
data to and from cloud computers presents a challenge because
of limited bandwidth. Consequently, the need arises to process
data near the data source, and fog computing provides a promising solution to this problem.
Fog computing is a novel trend in computing that aims to
process data near the data source. It pushes applications, serDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2017.2684981
Date of publication: 14 June 2017

74 IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

JULY 2017

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vices, data, computing power, and decision making away
from the centralized nodes to the logical extremes of a network. Fog computing significantly decreases the data volume
that must be moved between end devices and the cloud, and it
enables data analytics and knowledge generation to occur at
the data source. Furthermore, the dense geographic distribution of fog helps to attain better localized accuracy for many
applications as compared to the cloud.
Although fog computing alleviates some of the issues facing
the realization of future IoT/CPS applications, contemporary
fog nodes (e.g., edge servers, smart routers, and base stations)
may not be able to meet performance, throughput, energy, and
latency constraints of future IoT/CPS applications unless fogcomputing architecture is adapted to satisfy these application
requirements. This adaptation is needed at both the system and
the node level for fog computing. This article aims to address
the architectural challenges associated with the realization of
scalable IoT/CPS applications leveraging fog computing. Its
main contributions are the following:
▼ A presentation of a novel integrated fog cloud IoT (IFCIoT)
architectural paradigm that harnesses the benefits of the
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2017