Minimizing delay in IoT systems through collaborative fog-to-fog (F2F) communication

The recent advances in IoT technologies have led to the introduction of a plethora of networking, storage and computing systems. Today, the cloud computing system has evolved into the so-called fog-cloud computing paradigm to include computation, storage, and data exchange capabilities of edge devices. Although this rapid pace of evolution has led to the introduction of many IoT smart scenarios, many low-latency high-rate service scenarios are still considered impractical to be implemented. In this paper, we introduce a fog-to-fog (F2F) communication algorithm that allows fogs to communicate with each other to process job requests. In this type of communication paradigm, fogs are not limited to either execute a task or forward it to the cloud but also have the capability to collaborate with other neighboring fogs. This will minimize the overall end-to-end (e2e) latency. Case studies are considered in this paper to demonstrate that the adopted strategy may be applied to the Fog-Cloud system to reduce the overall e2e delay.