The “Droplet”: A new personal device to enable fog computing

Fog computing was introduced to complement the cloud computing paradigm in the era of Internet of Things. The main objective of fog computing is to push the processing and storage of the data closer to the edge of the network. This computation paradigm is proposed to reduce the latency of data processing, decrease the data flow from the different sensors to the cloud by local processing, and to prevent single points of failure. Although the fog computing paradigm benefits are clear, there is no clear adoption model that will help in spreading this computation paradigm through the networks. In this paper, we propose a new personal device, namely the “Droplet”. The adoption model for the Droplet make it suitable to be an enabler to the fog computing paradigm. The Droplet is a fixed, always connected, edge device that is owned and managed by the user while allowing other players to use it to realize the benefits of the fog computing. The Droplet is inspired by the wide spread and decrease in cost of single board computers. We discuss some potential applications of the Droplet that makes it appealing to be spread by the users. A prototype for the Droplet was built, and some of the potential applications were developed to run on the Droplet to prove the concept of the new personal device.