Sustainable Infrastructures, Protocols, and Research Challenges for Fog Computing

Submission Deadline: 15 April 2019

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions in the area of Sustainable Infrastructures, Protocols, and Research Challenges for Fog Computing.

Cloud computing continues to provide services related to storage and computation by managing a pool of high-cost resources. On the other hand, due to the distribution of applications and services closer to the end-users, academics and industry experts are now advocating for going from large-centralized cloud computing infrastructures to a range of computing nodes located at the edge of the network. Basically, fog computing extends the services and resources of the cloud closer to users, which facilitates the leveraging of available services and resources in the edge networks. Fog computing with the features (e.g., low latency, location awareness, and capacity of processing large number of nodes with wireless access) to support heterogeneity and real-time applications, is an attractive solution to delay- and resource-constrained large-scale wireless applications.

The concept of separating the network slices requires a number of technologies to be in place. Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), fog, and cloud technologies enable networks to be broken out from their underlying physical infrastructures so that they can programmatically provide connectivity as a service. Devices, which will vary greatly in nature, will need to use connectivity in a smart way, with minimal signaling, maximized sleep cycles and lean data transmission – sending only the information needed for the given service. Networks will need to be able to simultaneously support several Radio Access Technologies (RATs) and the radio environment will need to support service flexibility, all while maintaining control over costs and energy consumption. Furthermore, the benefit of SDN lies in its ability to provide an abstraction of the physical network infrastructure.

However, with the benefits of fog computing, there are many research challenges. For example, how to handle different protocols and data format from highly dissimilar data sources in fog layer? How to determine which data should be processed in cloud or be processed in fog layer while designing computation offloading strategies? Moreover, the privacy and security mechanisms within fog servers are also key design considerations. Developing sustainable infrastructures and protocols are major research challenges for fog computing. This Special Section in IEEE Access welcomes researchers from industry and academia to discuss these issues.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Architecture for fog computing
  • General performance models of fog computing
  • Content and service distribution models for fog computing
  • Caching, replication and relaying models for fog computing
  • Theoretical and experimental evaluation of information-centric networks for fog computing
  • Fog and mobile edge computing security and related considerations
  • Resource allocation aspects of fog computing
  • Real-time communication interfaces and protocols
  • Fog-enabled data services
  • Fog computing as an enabler for Augmented and Virtual Reality applications
  • Cyber-Physical systems realized through fog computing
  • Dependable fog computing
  • Fog computing as an enabler for 5G
  • 5G Quality-of-Service (QoS) improvements techniques using SDN, NFV, and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)
  • Future challenges and open issues in fog computing

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Associate Editor:  Mithun Mukherjee, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, China


Guest Editors:

  1. Maria Gorlatova, Duke University, USA
  2. James Gross, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  3. Mohammad Aazam, Carnegie Mellon University

 

Relevant IEEE Access Special Sections:

  1. Fog Radio Access Networks (F-RANs) for 5G: Recent Advances and Future Trends
  2. Smart Caching, Communications, Computing and Cybersecurity for Information-Centric Internet of Things
  3. Social Computing Applications for Smart Cities


IEEE Access Editor-in-Chief:
Michael Pecht, Professor and Director, CALCE, University of Maryland

Paper submission: Contact Associate Editor and submit manuscript to:
http://ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/ieee-access

For inquiries regarding this Special Section, please contact: mithun.mukherjee@outlook.com