Resource identification in fog-to-cloud systems: toward an identity management strategy

• Published in: Journal of reliable intelligent environments Vol. 5; no. 1; pp. 29 - 40
• Main Authors: Gómez-Cárdenas, Alejandro, Masip-Bruin, Xavi, Marín-Tordera, Eva, Kahvazadeh, Sarang
• Format: Journal Article Publication
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 12.04.2019; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Arquitectura de computadors; Artificial Intelligence; Cloud computing; Computació en núvol; Computer Science; Cybersecurity; Data centers; Electronic devices; Fog; Fog-to-cloud resource identification; Fragmentation; Health Informatics; Identification; Identity management; Idms; Informàtica; Internet de les coses; Internet of things; Original Article; Performance and Reliability; Resource identity; Resource management; Simulation and Modeling; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Àrees temàtiques de la UPC; Identification; Idms; Fog-to-cloud resource identification; Identity management; Resource identity
• ISSN: 2199-4668; 2199-4676; 2199-4676
• DOI: 10.1007/s40860-019-00074-1

Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) is a novel paradigm aiming at extending the cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network through the hierarchical and coordinated management of both, centralized cloud datacenters and distributed fog resources. It will allow all kinds of devices that are capable to connect to the F2C network to share its idle resources and access both, service provider and third parties’ resources to expand its own capabilities. However, despite the numerous advantages offered by the F2C model, such as the possibility of offloading delay-sensitive tasks to a nearby device and using the cloud infrastructure in the execution of resource-intensive tasks, the list of open challenges that needs to be addressed to have a deployable F2C system is pretty long. In this paper we focus on the resource identification challenge, proposing an identity management system (IDMS) solution that starts assigning identifiers (IDs) to the devices in the F2C network in a decentralized fashion using hashes and afterwards, manages the usage of those IDs applying a fragmentation technique. The obtained results during the validation phase show that our proposal not only meets the desired IDMS characteristics, but also that the fragmentation strategy is aligned with the constrained nature of the devices in the lowest tier of the network hierarchy.