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Exploring Internet of Things (IoT) data streams generated by smart cities means not only transforming data into better business decisions in a timely way but also generating long-term location intelligence for developing new forms of urban governance and organization policies. This paper proposes a new architecture based on the edge-fog-cloud continuum to analyze IoT data streams for delivering data-driven insights in a smart parking scenario.

Exploring Internet of Things (IoT) data streams generated by smart cities means not only transforming data into better business decisions in a timely way but also generating long-term location intelligence for developing new forms of urban governance and organization policies. This paper proposes a new architecture based on the edge-fog-cloud continuum to analyze IoT data streams for delivering data-driven insights in a smart parking scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The huge amount of data produced by the Internet of Things need to be validated and curated to be prepared for the selection of relevant data in order to prototype models, train them, and serve the model. On the other side, blockchains and open data are also important data sources that need to be integrated into the proposed integrative models. It is difficult to find a sufficiently versatile and agnostic architecture based on the main machine learning frameworks that facilitate model development and allow continuous training to continuously improve them from the data streams. The paper describes the conceptualization, implementation, and testing of a new architecture that proposes a use case agnostic processing chain. The proposed architecture is mainly built around the Apache Submarine, an unified Machine Learning platform that facilitates the training and deployment of algorithms. Here, Internet of Things data are collected and formatted at the edge level. They are then processed and validated at the fog level. On the other hand, open data and blockchain data via Blockchain Access Layer are directly processed at the cloud level. Finally, the data are preprocessed to feed scalable machine learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid growth in the data and processing over the cloud, it has become easier to access those data. On the other hand, it poses many technical and security challenges to the users of those provisions. Fog computing makes these technical issues manageable to some extent. Fog computing is one of the promising solutions for handling the big data produced by the IoT, which are often security-critical and time-sensitive. Massive IoT data analytics by a fog computing structure is emerging and requires extensive research for more proficient knowledge and smart decisions. Though an advancement in big data analytics is taking place, it does not consider fog data analytics. However, there are many challenges, including heterogeneity, security, accessibility, resource sharing, network communication overhead, the real-time data processing of complex data, etc. This paper explores various research challenges and their solution using the next-generation fog data analytics and IoT networks. We also performed an experimental analysis based on fog computing and cloud architecture. The result shows that fog computing outperforms the cloud in terms of network utilization and latency. Finally, the paper is concluded with future trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, Healthcare 4.0 has empowered the integration of advanced technologies to create and improve the quality of healthcare services. The delivery of healthcare services has come a long way from physical appointments with doctors to remote health monitoring and disease prediction, surgery assistive systems. This advancement has only been possible because of the integration of cutting-edge technologies like Tele-healthcare, software-defined networking and many more, with healthcare systems. In this survey, we have targeted some of the pioneering research works that could contribute significantly to the future development of Healthcare 4.0 systems. We have identified the significant research gaps and presented the modern state-of-the-art of healthcare systems, introducing the Healthcare IoT Application and Service Stacks. We have also discussed the latest paradigm of Wireless Body Area Networks, emphasizing its significance and how it can contribute to the development of next-generation healthcare applications using emerging technologies like Machine Learning, Blockchain, Cloud Computing, Internet of things, Edge/ Fog Computing, Tele-healthcare, Big Data Analytics, Software-Defined Networking and many more. We have performed a comparative study of different architectural implementations considering their advantages, shortcomings, and quality-of-service requirements. We emphasize the importance of the different emerging technologies in detail, discussing the opportunities available and their potential to create better healthcare solutions that can provide superior service quality. Finally, we highlight the fundamental need for establishing security and privacy in future healthcare systems. Overall, this survey provides a strong outlook into the development of the future of healthcare 4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The uprising of Internet of Things (IoT) has dramatically influenced the world's technology in terms of interoperability, connectivity and interconnectivity with help of smart sensors, devices, objects, data and applications. General population aging, dearth of healthcare resources and upsurge in healthcare costs makes IoT advancements in healthcare all the more essential in order to confront these challenges. The revolution in IoT healthcare is redeveloping the healthcare sector in every aspect – social, technical and economical. This article presents a comprehensive survey on upcoming technologies helpful in healthcare 4.0 systems where the major focus is on emerging technologies like fog computing, cloud computing, machine learning and Bigdata analytics and that are all based on IoT based healthcare applications. In addition, the authors also provided an exhaustive survey on Wide Body Area Network (WBAN)-based IoT health care systems and discussed their network topology, architecture, platform, services and their applications. In addition, this study analyses IoT healthcare security challenges, possible threats, attack taxonomies and how blockchain technology can be helpful in countering these challenges. Lastly, exhaustive state-of-the-art technologies, challenges identified so far and possible future scope of this domain is also discussed in this survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging IoT applications with stringent requirements on latency and data processing have posed many challenges to cloud-centric platforms for Smart Cities. Recently, Fog Computing has been advocated as a promising approach to support such new applications and handle the increasing volume of IoT data and devices. The Fog Computing paradigm is characterized by a horizontal system-level architecture where devices close to end-users and IoT devices are used for processing, storage, and networking functions. Fog Computing platforms aim to facilitate the development of applications and systems for Smart Cities by providing services and abstractions designed to integrate data from IoT devices and various information systems deployed in the city. Despite the potential of the Fog Computing paradigm, the literature still lacks a broad, comprehensive overview of what has been investigated on the use of such paradigm in platforms for Smart Cities and open issues to be addressed in future research and development. In this paper, a systematic mapping study was performed and we present a comprehensive understanding of the use of the Fog Computing paradigm in Smart Cities platforms, providing an overview of the current state of research on this topic, and identifying important gaps in the existing approaches and promising research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epilepsy is a psychosocial neurological disorder, which emerges as a major threat to public health. In this age of the internet of things, the smart diagnosis of epilepsy has gained huge research attention with machine learning-based seizure detection in cloud-fog assisted environments. The present paper also proposes a cloud-fog integrated smart neurocare approach, which performs a temporal analysis of raw electroencephalogram (EEG) signals using deep learning to detect the occurrence of epileptic seizures. This patient-independent approach makes use of single-channel EEG signals to achieve real-time and computationally efficient seizure detection at fog layer devices. It employs a maximum variance-based channel selection procedure to select only one channel of raw scalp EEG signals, followed by their filtering and segmentation into various short-duration temporal segments. To analyse EEG patterns, these segments are further fed to the proposed models of convolutional neural network, recurrent neural network and stacked autoencoder deep learning classifiers. The performance analysis through simulation results evidently reveals that the proposed convolutional neural network-based temporal analysis approach performs better than other approaches. It realises an optimum accuracy of 96.43%, sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 93.33% for 30s duration EEG segments of CHB-MIT dataset and achieves 100% accuracy, sensitivity and specificity values for EEG segments of Bonn dataset for 23.6s EEG segments. Thus, the proposed convolutional neural network-based approach emerges as an appropriate method for rapid and accurate detection of epileptic seizures in fog-cloud integrated environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid proliferation and progress of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) has conducted to the formation of a gigantic amount of data and a growing need to multiple new services and resources. In spite of the main role of Cloud computing in solving these issues, IoT applications need more reduced latency with mobility support and location awareness. To overcome the mentioned limits, a new concept favouring the integration of Fog computing onto IoT is increasingly utilized. It is a motivating scheme that offers a timely task execution and data management at the network edge, in a distributed way, with the collaboration of nearby nodes. In this paper, we provide a complete study of the integration of Fog onto IoT. We discuss the various challenges that are facing the Fog/IoT paradigm and specify the main contributions that have been proposed to overcome these challenges. We give also an insight on the relationship between IoT/Fog integration concept, and other leading technologies. The open issues that need more investigation are highlighted in this paper to identify clearly the research gaps in the area of Fog computing integration onto IoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on time-sensitive applications implemented in fog computing environments. The goal is to research what applications are being implemented in fog computing architectures and how the temporal requirements of these applications are being addressed. We also carried out a comprehensive analysis of the articles surveyed and separate them into categories, according to a pattern found in them. Our research is important for the area of real-time systems since the concept of systems that respond in real time has presented various understandings and concepts. This variability of concept has been due to the growing requirements for fast data communication and processing. Therefore, we present different concepts of real-time and near real-time systems found in the literature and currently accepted by the academic-scientific community. Finally, we conduct an analytical discussion of the characteristics and proposal of articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fog computing is becoming a vital component for Internet of things (IoT) applications, acting as its computational engine. Mission-critical IoT applications are highly sensitive to latency, which depends on the physical location of the cloud server. Fog nodes of varying response rates are available to the cloud service provider (CSP) and it is faced with a challenge of forwarding the sequentially received IoT data to one of the fog nodes for processing. Since the arrival times and nature of requests is random, it is important to optimally classify the requests in real-time and allocate available virtual machine instances (VMIs) at the fog nodes to provide a high QoE to the users and consequently generate higher revenues for the CSP. In this paper, we use a pricing policy based on the QoE of the applications as a result of the allocation and obtain an optimal dynamic allocation rule based on the statistical information of the computational requests. The developed solution is statistically optimal, dynamic, and implementable in real-time as opposed to other static matching schemes in the literature. The performance of the proposed framework has been evaluated using simulations and the results show significant improvement as compared with benchmark schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Definition: Knowledge integration is well explained by the human--organization--technology (HOT) approach known from knowledge management. This approach contains the horizontal and vertical interaction and communication between employees, human-to-machine, but also machine-to-machine. Different organizational structures and processes are supported with the help of appropriate technologies and suitable data processing and integration techniques. In a Smart Factory, manufacturing systems act largely autonomously on the basis of continuously collected data. The technical design concerns the networking of machines, their connectivity and the interaction between human and machine as well as machine-to-machine. Within a Smart Factory, machines can be considered as intelligent manufacturing systems. Such manufacturing systems can autonomously adapt to events through the ability to intelligently analyze data and act as adaptive manufacturing systems that consider changes in production, the supply chain and customer requirements. Inter-connected physical devices, sensors, actuators, and controllers form the building block of the Smart Factory, which is called the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT uses different data processing solutions, such as cloud computing, fog computing, or edge computing, to fuse and process data. This is accomplished in an integrated and cross-device manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Internet of Things (IoT) data processing, cloud computing alone does not suffice due to latency constraints, bandwidth limitations, and privacy concerns. By introducing intermediary nodes closer to the edge of the network that offer compute services in proximity to IoT devices, fog computing can reduce network strain and high access latency to application services. While this is the only viable approach to enable efficient IoT applications, the issue of component placement among cloud and intermediary nodes in the fog adds a new dimension to system design. State‐of‐the‐art solutions to this issue rely on simulation or solving a formalized assignment problem through heuristics only, which both have their drawbacks. In this article, we present a five‐step process for designing practical fog‐based IoT applications that combines best practices, simulation, and testbed analysis to converge towards an efficient system architecture. We then apply this process in a smart factory case study. By deploying filtered options to a physical testbed, we show that each step of our process converges towards more efficient application designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing has long been the main backbone that Internet of Things (IoT) devices rely on to accommodate their storage and analytical needs. However, the fact that cloud systems are often located quite far from the IoT devices and the emergence of delay-critical IoT applications urged the need for extending the cloud architecture to support delay-critical services. Given that fog nodes possess low resource capabilities compared to the cloud, matching the IoT services to appropriate fog nodes while guaranteeing minimal delay for IoT services and efficient resource utilization on fog nodes becomes quite challenging. In this context, the main limitation of existing approaches is addressing the scheduling problem from one side perspective, i.e., either fog nodes or IoT devices. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a multi-criteria intelligent IoT-Fog scheduling approach using game theory. Our solution consists of designing (1) preference functions for the IoT and fog layers to enable them to rank each other based on several criteria latency and resource utilization and (2) centralized and distributed intelligent scheduling algorithms that capitalize on matching theory and consider the preferences of both parties. Simulation results reveal that our solution outperforms the two common Min-Min and Max-Min scheduling approaches in terms of IoT services execution makespan and fog nodes resource consolidation efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of intelligent transportation systems, enormous amounts of delay-sensitive vehicular services have been emerging and challenge both the architectures and protocols of vehicular networks. However, existing cloud computing-embedded vehicular networks cannot guarantee timely data processing or service access, due to long propagation delay and traffic congestion at the cloud center. Meanwhile, the current distributed network architecture does not support scalable network management, leading the intelligent data computing policies to be undeployable. With this motivation, we propose to introduce fog computing into vehicular networks and define the Multiple Time-constrained Vehicular applications Scheduling (MTVS) issue. First, to improve the network flexibility and controllability, we introduce a Fog-based Base Station (FBS) and propose a Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-enabled architecture dividing the networks into network, fog, and control layers. To address MTVS issue, instead of normal centralized computing-based approaches, we propose to distribute mobile delay-sensitive task in data-level over multiple FBSs. In particular, we regard the fog layer of SDN-enabled network as an FBS-based network and propose to distribute the computing task based on the FBSs along multiple paths in the fog layer. By Linear Programming, we optimize the optimal data distribution/transmission model by formulating the delay computation model. Then, we propose a hybrid scheduling algorithm including both local scheduling and fog scheduling, which can be deployed on the proposed SDN-enabled vehicular networks. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach performs better than some recent research outcomes, especially in the success rate for addressing MTVS issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we characterize the main building blocks and numerically verify the classification accuracy and energy performance of SmartFog, a distributed and virtualized networked Fog technological platform for the support for Stacked Denoising Auto-Encoder (SDAE)-based anomaly detection in data flows generated by Smart-Meters (SMs). In SmartFog, the various layers of an SDAE are pretrained at different Fog nodes, in order to distribute the overall computational efforts and, then, save energy. For this purpose, a new Adaptive Elitist Genetic Algorithm (AEGA) is "ad hoc" designed to find the optimized allocation of the SDAE layers to the Fog nodes. Interestingly, the proposed AEGA implements a (novel) mechanism that adaptively tunes the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the AEGA, in order to quickly escape the attraction basins of local minima of the underlying energy objective function and, then, speed up the convergence towards global minima. As a matter of fact, the main distinguishing feature of the resulting SmartFog paradigm is that it accomplishes the joint integration on a distributed Fog computing platform of the anomaly detection functionality and the minimization of the resulting energy consumption. The reported numerical tests support the effectiveness of the designed technological platform and point out that the attained performance improvements over some state-of-the-art competing solutions are around 5%, 68% and 30% in terms of detection accuracy, execution time and energy consumption, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fog computing is an emerging technology. It has the potential of enabling various wireless networks to offer computational services based on certain requirements given by the user. Typically, the users give their computing tasks to the network manager that has the responsibility of allocating needed fog nodes optimally for conducting the computation effectively. The optimal allocation of nodes with respect to various metrics is essential for fast execution and stable, energy-efficient, balanced, and cost-effective allocation. This article aims to optimize multiple objectives using fog computing by developing multi-objective optimization with high exploitive searching. The developed algorithm is an evolutionary genetic type designated as Hyper Angle Exploitative Searching (HAES). It uses hyper angle along with crowding distance for prioritizing solutions within the same rank and selecting the highest priority solutions. The approach was evaluated on multi-objective mathematical problems and its superiority was revealed by comparing its performance with benchmark approaches. A framework of multi-criteria optimization for fog computing was proposed, the Fog Computing Closed Loop Model (FCCL). Results have shown that HAES outperforms other relevant benchmarks in terms of non-domination and optimality metrics with over 70% confidence of the t-test for rejecting the null-hypothesis of non-superiority in terms of the domination metric set coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The volume of streaming sensor data from various environmental sensors continues to increase rapidly due to wider deployments of IoT devices at much greater scales than ever before. This, in turn, causes massive increase in the fog, cloud network traffic which leads to heavily delayed network operations. In streaming data analytics, the ability to obtain real time data insight is crucial for computational sustainability for many IoT enabled applications such as environmental monitors, pollution and climate surveillance, traffic control or even E-commerce applications. However, such network delays prevent us from achieving high quality real-time data analytics of environmental information. In order to address this challenge, we propose the Fog Sampling Node Selector (Fossel) technique that can significantly reduce the IoT network and processing delays by algorithmically selecting an optimal subset of fog nodes to perform the sensor data sampling. In addition, our technique performs a simple type of query executions within the fog nodes in order to further reduce the network delays by processing the data near the data producing devices. Our extensive evaluations show that Fossel technique outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of latency reduction as well as in bandwidth consumption, network usage and energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of a ubiquitous Internet of Things and fast artificial intelligence advance, especially thanks to deep learning networks and hardware acceleration, we face rapid growth of highly decentralized and intelligent solutions that offer functionality of data processing closer to the end user. Internet of Things usually produces a huge amount of data that to be effectively analyzed, especially with neural networks, demands high computing capabilities. Processing all the data in the cloud may not be sufficient in cases when we need privacy and low latency, and when we have limited Internet bandwidth, or it is simply too expensive. It poses a challenge for creating a new generation of fog computing that supports artificial intelligence and selects the architecture appropriate for an intelligent solution. In this article, we show from four perspectives, namely, hardware, software libraries, platforms, and current applications, the landscape of components used for developing intelligent Internet of Things solutions located near where the data are generated. This way, we pinpoint the odds and risks of artificial intelligence fog computing and help in the process of selecting suitable architecture and components that will satisfy all requirements defined by the complex Internet of Things systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things has the potential of transforming health systems through the collection and analysis of patient physiological data via wearable devices and sensor networks. Such systems can offer assisted living services in real-time and offer a range of multimedia-based health services. However, service downtime, particularly in the case of emergencies, can lead to adverse outcomes and in the worst case, death. In this paper, we propose an e-health monitoring architecture based on sensors that relies on cloud and fog infrastructures to handle and store patient data. Furthermore, we propose stochastic models to analyze availability and performance of such systems including models to understand how failures across the Cloud-to-Thing continuum impact on e-health system availability and to identify potential bottlenecks. To feed our models with real data, we design and build a prototype and execute performance experiments. Our results identify that the sensors and fog devices are the components that have the most significant impact on the availability of the e-health monitoring system, as a whole, in the scenarios analyzed. Our findings suggest that in order to identify the best architecture to host the e-health monitoring system, there is a trade-off between performance and delays that must be resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]