IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2017 - 79

distributed storage capability of fog nodes to decrease the load
on the front haul (connection between centralized baseband
controllers and remote radio heads at cell sites in a new radioaccess network architecture) and avoid large-scale radio signal
processing in the centralized baseband controllers.

the local content, services, and applications or to update the
federated cloud data center. The federated cloud data center
receives updates from multiple fog nodes and can then perform large data analytics on the received information to extract
information representative of a larger geographical location
and to determine global system statistics.

RECONFIGURABLE AND ADAPTIVE
FOG-NODE/EDGE-SERVER ARCHITECTURE

FOG ARCHITECTURE
The fog comprises fog nodes and in part radio-access networks as depicted in Figure 2. This section discusses the
radio access network and our proposed fog node architecture
for the IFCIoT architectural paradigm.

Workload analytics on a server or cloud reveals that different
applications have various peak load hours at different times [14].
We exploit this time variance of applications' peak workloads to
propose a reconfigurable and adaptive multicore architecture for
edge servers that can adapt according to the application load
being run at a given time to better sustain the projected data
velocity, data volume, and real-time requirements of IoT/CPS
applications. Our proposed edge-server architecture consists of
several layers: an application layer, an analytics layer, a virtualization layer, a reconfiguration layer, and a hardware layer, as
shown in Figure 3.

RADIO-ACCESS NETWORK
IoT end devices can leverage a multitude of wireless-access
technologies, such as WLAN, WiMAX, and cellular-access networks [e.g., 3G and long-term evolution (LTE)], as the radioaccess network for accessing the fog. According to the
OpenFog Consortium, fog nodes are not completely fixed to the
edge but should be seen as a fluid system of connectivity.
Hence, the radio-access network can be considered partially a
part of the fog architecture. Fog computing enables the design
of an energy- and spectral-efficient radio-access network, which
can be called a fog-computing-based radio-access network
(F-RAN) [13]. The F-RAN can take advantage of local radio
signal processing, cooperative radio resource management, and

APPLICATION LAYER
The application layer is the topmost layer of the edge server
architecture. It consists of application-platform services that
the edge server can provide to various applications hosted on
the edge server. The application-platform services provided by
the edge server include services for computation offloading,

Federated Cloud Services

Radio Network
Cloud

Radio

Core Network

Router

Edge

Apps
Content
Services
Edge

Edge

WLAN
WiMAX
Cellular

Apps
Content
Services

Edge Server

Apps
Content
Services

RAN
Radio

Radio

FOG

Radio
Wares
Wares

Alert!

IoT Clusters

°F
Emergency
Exit

FIGURE 2. The IFCIoT architectural paradigm.

JULY 2017

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2017