Context
This study concerns the adoption of the IoT technology for the home monitoring of the health status of fragile patients. IoT adoption in healthcare is one of the most promising business domains today; according to the current trend, the market will increase in the near future.
Problem
The prevalent deployment model of IoT systems is the Cloud which offers powerful services and unlimited storage/computing capacity on-demand; unfortunately, connecting smart devices to the Cloud poses severe issues. First of all, connected devices create large volumes of data, which will drive inevitably to performance and network congestion challenges. Secondly, there are performance, security, bandwidth, and reliability concerns that make the Cloud-only solution not suitable for all the potential real-world applications. The Fog computing paradigm has been introduced to bridge the gap between the Cloud and IoT devices.
Results
This paper gives a twofold contribution: (a) a Fog-based architecture is proposed using 3-tiers solution where the Fog computing layer constitutes the middle tier; (b) simulations have been carried out in order to compare Cloud-Fog computing as an alternative to the Cloud-only solution. The experimental results demonstrate a remarkable reduction of the values of several parameters in the first solution with respect to the second one. The measured benefits are important in the target application domain. The iFogSim2 open-source toolkit has been used to carry out the experiments.