RSock: A resilient routing protocol for mobile Fog/Edge networks

Fog/Edge networks (FENs) refer to wireless networks in which a “close-to-end-user cloud” is established amongst handheld devices to offer communication, computation, and storage services. In this paper, we focus on FENs that are formed by on-body devices of first responders and leveraged (as mission-critical deployable networks) in disaster-response scenarios. Designing an efficient routing protocol for such FENs is challenging since they exhibit dynamic connectivity characteristics and unreliable wireless links due to the mobility of devices, wireless obstacles, etc. Moreover, FENs applications in disaster-response scenarios distribute their processing/storage tasks to local nodes and accordingly have diverse requirements in terms of packet delivery’s rate and delay (PDR and PDD). On the other hand, most of the state-of-the-art routing protocols are not suitable for FENs since their target networks have static connectivity characteristics. Furthermore, these protocols provide poor support for seamless mobility communication and for exploiting all devices’ wireless interfaces as well as their initial/subsequent deployment(s) require pushing changes to the TCP/IP stack. In this paper, we present Resilient Socket (RSock), a limited-replication-based routing protocol that decides whether to use packet replication and by how much based on the mission-critical deployable FENs connectivity conditions. RSock is an identity-based routing protocol that exploits all wireless interfaces to route/deliver packets for IP-address/interface agnostic applications. We design RSock as an easy-to deploy-and-evolve protocol and we demonstrate its feasibility through a reliable full-system implementation for Linux and Android platforms. Real-world experiments show that RSock performs well in disaster-response scenarios.