An IOTA-Based Service Discovery Framework for Fog Computing

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 10; no. 7; p. 844
• Main Authors: Tang, Tsung-Yi, Hou, Li-Yuan, Liang, Tyng-Yeu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.04.2021
• Subjects: Clients; Cloud computing; Data centers; Distributed ledger; End users; Internet of Things; Internet service providers; Network latency; Nodes; Registration; Software
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics10070844

With the rise in fog computing, users are no longer restricted to only accessing resources located in central and distant clouds and can request services from neighboring fog nodes distributed over networks. This can effectively reduce the network latency of service responses and the load of data centers. Furthermore, it can prevent the Internet’s bandwidth from being used up due to massive data flows from end users to clouds. However, fog-computing resources are distributed over multiple levels of networks and are managed by different owners. Consequently, the problem of service discovery becomes quite complicated. For resolving this problem, a decentralized service discovery method is required. Accordingly, this research proposes a service discovery framework based on the distributed ledger technology of IOTA. The proposed framework enables clients to directly search for service nodes through any node in the IOTA Mainnet to achieve the goals of public access and high availability and avoid network attacks to distributed hash tables that are popularly used for service discovery. Moreover, clients can obtain more comprehensive information by visiting known nodes and select a fog node able to provide services with the shortest latency. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed framework is cost-effective for distributed service discovery due to the advantages of IOTA. On the other hand, it can indeed enable clients to obtain higher service quality by automatic node selection.