Examining the Performance of Fog-Aided, Cloud-Centered IoT in a Real-World Environment.

The fog layer provides substantial benefits in cloud-based IoT applications because it can serve as an aggregation layer and it moves the computation resources nearer to the IoT devices; however, it is important to ensure adequate performance is achieved in such applications, as the devices usually communicate frequently and authenticate with the cloud. This can cause performance and availability issues, which can be dangerous in critical applications such as in the healthcare sector. In this paper, we analyze the efficacy of the fog layer in different architectures in a real-world environment by examining performance metrics for the cloud and fog layers using different numbers of IoT devices.