Today, communication between IoT devices heavily relies on fog-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems. Communicating via the cloud, however, results in a latency that is too high for many IoT applications. In this paper, we describe the design of a fog-based pub/sub system that integrates edge resources to improve communication latency between end devices in proximity. To this end, geo-distributed broker instances organize themselves in dynamically sized broadcast groups. Each broadcast group comprises a set of well connected edge brokers that communicate directly using flooding. This minimizes communication latency and copes well with frequently updated subscriptions and mobile end devices, which is required by many IoT applications. Messages between broadcast groups are routed via a massively scalable fog broker that pre-filters messages to reduce excess data dissemination. Our approach, therefore, manages the tradeoff between latency and excess data.

In the Internet of Things, the relevance of data often depends on the geographic context of data producers and consumers. Today’s data distribution services, however, mostly focus on data content and not on geo-context, which could help to reduce the dissemination of excess data in many IoT scenarios. In this paper, we propose to use the geo-context information associated with devices to control data distribution. We define what geo-context dimensions exist and compare our definition with concepts from related work. Furthermore, we designed GeoBroker, a data distribution service that uses the location of things, as well as geofences for messages and subscriptions, to control data distribution. This way, we enable new IoT application scenarios while also increasing overall system efficiency for scenarios where geo-contexts matter by delivering only relevant messages. We evaluate our approach based on a proof-of-concept prototype and several experiments.

Fog computing is an emerging computing paradigm that uses processing and storage capabilities located at the edge, in the cloud, and possibly in between. Testing fog applications, however, is hard since runtime infrastructures will typically be in use or may not exist, yet. In this paper, we propose an approach that emulates such infrastructures in the cloud. Developers can freely design emulated fog infrastructures, configure their performance characteristics, and inject failures at runtime to evaluate their application in various deployments and failure scenarios. We also present our proof-of-concept implementation MockFog and show that application performance is comparable when running on MockFog or a small fog infrastructure testbed.