The Fog of Things Paradigm: Road toward On-Demand Internet of Things

In this article, we introduce the concept of FoT, a paradigm for on-demand IoT. On-demand IoT is an IoT platform where heterogeneous connected things can be accessed and managed via a uniform platform based on real-time demands. Realizing such a platform faces challenges including heterogeneity, scalability, responsiveness, and robustness, due to the large-scale and complex nature of an IoT environment. The FoT paradigm features the incorporation of fog computing power, which empowers not only the IoT applications, but more importantly the scalable and efficient management of the system itself. FoT utilizes a flat-structured virtualization plane and a hierarchical control plane, both of which extend to the network edge and can be reconfigured in real time, to achieve various design goals. In addition to describing the detailed design of the FoT paradigm, we also highlight challenges and opportunities involved in the deployment, management, and operation of such an on-demand IoT platform. We hope this article can shed some light on how to build and maintain a practical and extensible control back-end to enable large-scale IoT that empowers our connected world.