A Cloud to the Ground: The New Frontier of Intelligent and Autonomous Networks of Things

The Internet of Things paradigm is supporting - and will support - an ever increasing number of services and applications impacting on almost every aspect of our everyday life. The current trend is forecasting IoT to connect tens of billions of objects by 2020 yielding a very high volume of data to be acquired, transmitted, and processed. IoT typically relies on cloud computing to process, analyze, and store the data acquired by IoT entities. Unfortunately, the need to transmit all data from the information producing objects to the cloud for a subsequent processing/analysis phase would require a large bandwidth and increase the latency in the decision making process whenever decisions/reactions must be promptly made by the IoT units. The fog computing paradigm aims to address these problems by extending cloud computing toward the edge of the network. In this direction, this article introduces a novel FC-IoT paradigm designed to move computing, storage, and applications/services close to IoT objects so as to reduce communication bandwidth and energy consumption as well as decision making latency. The proposed IoT-based solution has been designed to have intelligent and autonomous IoT objects that are integrated with an FC and fog networking approach. The distinguishing features of the intelligent FC-IoT platform are low latency, self-adaptation, low energy consumption, and spectrum efficiency.