A Paradigm for Collaborative Pervasive Fog Computing Ecosystems at the Network Edge

While the success of edge and fog computing increased with the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, such novel computing paradigm, that moves compute resources closer to the source of data and services, must address many challenges such as reducing communication overhead to/from datacenters, the latency to compute and receive results, as well as energy consumption at the mobile and IoT devices. fog-to-fog (f2f) cooperation has recently been proposed to increase the computation capacity at the network edge through cooperation across multiple stakeholders. In this paper we adopt an analytical approach to studying f2f cooperation paradigm. We highlight the benefits of using such new paradigm in comparison with traditional three-tier fog computing paradigms. We use a Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) model for the N f2f cooperating nodes and cast cooperation as an optimization problem, which we solve using the proposed model.