Managing Wireless Fog Networks using Software-Defined Networking

Fog computing has recently emerged as a new cyber foraging technique to offload resource-intensive tasks from mobile devices to mobile cloudlets in close proximity to end users. Since the one-hop communication in the network edge is predominantly wireless, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are being considered to build wireless fog networks. However, WMNs use distributed hop-by-hop routing protocols to reflect a partial visibility of the network, which limits their ability to perform global network management and monitoring needed by fog networks. Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides a centralized control and management of the entire network, which makes it a good candidate to support fog communication. Unfortunately, the SDN OpenFlow protocol does not support any functionalities for wireless fog networks as it is primarily targeted to wired networks. To address these issues, this paper presents a SDN-enabled wireless fog architecture that combines both OpenFlow and distributed wireless protocols. The proposed solution provides lower latency and efficient load balancing to offload the network load by enabling programmable fog routers.