Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) Data Management for Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart cities are the current technological solutions to handle the challenges and complexity of the growing urban density. Traditionally, smart city resources management rely on cloud based solutions where sensors data are collected to provide a centralized and rich set of open data. The advantages of cloudbased frameworks are their ubiquity, as well as an (almost) unlimited resources capacity. However, accessing data from the cloud implies large network traffic, high latencies usually not appropriate for real-time or critical solutions, as well as higher security risks. Alternatively, fog computing emerges as a promising technology to absorb these inconveniences. It proposes the use of devices at the edge to provide closer computing facilities and, therefore, reducing network traffic, reducing latencies drastically while improving security. We have defined a new framework for data management in the context of a smart city through a global fog to cloud resources management architecture. This model has the advantages of both, fog and cloud technologies, as it allows reduced latencies for critical applications while being able to use the high computing capabilities of cloud technology. In this paper, we present the data acquisition block of our framework and discuss the advantages. As a first experiment, we estimate the network traffic in this model during data collection and compare it with a traditional real system