CICO: A Credit-Based Incentive Mechanism for COoperative Fog Computing Paradigms

Fog computing is a key paradigm that brings together shared storage, low latency communication, and computation resources closer to users' end-devices. While most IoT services adopt a three-tier computing architecture, where fog nodes are always probed first before reaching a distant Cloud, collaboration across multi-stakeholder, multi-tenant fog providers remains unexplored. In this paper, we quantitatively highlight the gain which may arise if a collaborative fog computing paradigm is deployed. Next, we propose CICO, an incentive based collaborative mechanism for fog computing networks. CICO regulates a multi-stakeholder, multi-tenant cooperation among fog providers. We present a mathematical model and an experimental approach to make the case for such cooperation paradigm.