HOlistic pRocessing and NETworking (HORNET): An Integrated Solution for IoT-based Fog Computing Services

Fog Computing is a recent and compelling paradigm that proposes to run information-processing services at the edge of the network. While interesting standardization efforts in Fog Computing are being currently pursued by many organizations, most of them focus on management and orchestration functions, and primarily propose the adoption and adaptation of programming models designed for Cloud applications. Instead, Fog Computing applications would significantly benefit from innovative solutions that, on the one hand, adopt an “acceptable lossiness” perspective and manage information processing/dissemination in a dynamic and integrated way and, on the other hand, support a Multi Layer Routing (MLR) approach to exploit multiple routing options at different abstraction levels at the same time. This paper presents an overview of the opportunities and challenges of Fog Computing-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications by jointly exploiting acceptable lossiness and MLR. In addition, the paper proposes the innovative Holistic pRocessing and NETworking (HORNET) Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution which leverages an information-centric and value-based service model and the MLR approach to support IoT applications. The reported preliminary experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.