Spatially Cohesive Service Discovery and Dynamic Service Handover for Distributed IoT Environments

As a promising topic of research, Vehicular Cloud (VC) incorporates cloud computing and ad-hoc vehicular network (VANET). In VC, supplier vehicles provide their services to consumer vehicles in real-time. These services have a significant impact on the applications of internet access, storage and data. Due to the high-speed mobility of vehicles, users in consumer vehicles need a mechanism to discover services in their vicinity. Besides this, quality of service varies from one supplier vehicle to another; thus, consumer vehicles attempt to pick out the most appropriate services. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol named RSU-aided Cluster-based Vehicular Clouds protocol (RCVC), which constructs the VC using the Road Side Unit (RSU) directory and Cluster Head (CH) directory to make the resources of supplier vehicles more visible. While clusters of vehicles that move on the same road form a mobile cloud, the remaining vehicles form a different cloud on the road side unit. Furthermore, the consumption operation is achieved via the service selection method, which is managed by the CHs and RSUs based on a mathematical model to select the best services. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of our protocol in terms of service discovery and end-to-end delay, where we achieved service discovery and end-to-end delay of 3 × 10−3 s and 13 × 10−2 s, respectively. Moreover, we carried out an experimental comparison, revealing that the proposed method outperformed several states of the art protocols.

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An IOTA-Based Service Discovery Framework for Fog Computing

Electronics ◽

10.3390/electronics10070844 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (7) ◽

pp. 844

Author(s):

Tsung-Yi Tang ◽

Li-Yuan Hou ◽

Tyng-Yeu Liang

Keyword(s):

Service Discovery ◽

Fog Computing ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Public Access ◽

Hash Tables ◽

Network Attacks ◽

Comprehensive Information ◽

Data Flows ◽

Multiple Levels ◽

Discovery Method

With the rise in fog computing, users are no longer restricted to only accessing resources located in central and distant clouds and can request services from neighboring fog nodes distributed over networks. This can effectively reduce the network latency of service responses and the load of data centers. Furthermore, it can prevent the Internet’s bandwidth from being used up due to massive data flows from end users to clouds. However, fog-computing resources are distributed over multiple levels of networks and are managed by different owners. Consequently, the problem of service discovery becomes quite complicated. For resolving this problem, a decentralized service discovery method is required. Accordingly, this research proposes a service discovery framework based on the distributed ledger technology of IOTA. The proposed framework enables clients to directly search for service nodes through any node in the IOTA Mainnet to achieve the goals of public access and high availability and avoid network attacks to distributed hash tables that are popularly used for service discovery. Moreover, clients can obtain more comprehensive information by visiting known nodes and select a fog node able to provide services with the shortest latency. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed framework is cost-effective for distributed service discovery due to the advantages of IOTA. On the other hand, it can indeed enable clients to obtain higher service quality by automatic node selection.

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