A Fog-based Distributed Look-up Service for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Future intelligent transportation systems and applications are expected to greatly benefit from the integration with a cloud computing infrastructure for service reliability and efficiency. More recently, fog computing has been proposed as a new computing paradigm to support low-latency and location-aware services by moving the execution of application logic on devices at the edge of the network in proximity of the physical systems, e.g. in the roadside infrastructure or directly in the connected vehicles. Such distributed runtime environment can support low-latency communication with sensors and actuators thus allowing functions such as real-time monitoring and remote control, e.g. for remote telemetry of public transport vehicles or remote control under emergency situations, respectively. These applications will require support for some basic functionalities from the runtime. Among them, discovery of sensors and actuators will be a significant challenge considering the large variety of sensors and actuators and their mobility. In this paper, a discovery service specifically tailored for fog computing platforms with mobile nodes is proposed. Instead of adopting a centralized approach, we pro-pose an approach based on a distributed hash table to be implemented by fog nodes, exploiting their storage and computation capabilities. The proposed approach supports by design multiple attributes and range queries. A prototype of the proposed service has been implemented and evaluated experimentally.