Towards Fault Tolerant Fog Computing for IoT-Based Smart City Applications

Fog computing can provide many services to support IoT-based smart city applications. Fog computing usually consists of multiple nodes that are distributed across a smart city to enable IoT-based smart city applications such as intelligent transportation, smart energy, smart water, smart health, smart infrastructure monitoring, and smart environmental monitoring. The Fog platform will allow executing services geographically close to the IoT-based smart city applications to provide low latency, location awareness, mobility, streaming, management, and real-time support. One of the main issues with this support is the reliability and fault tolerance of the fog platform. This paper discusses the issues of reliability and fault tolerance for fog platforms supporting IoT-based smart city applications. It investigates different considerations to achieve a good degree of fault-tolerance for fog computing supporting smart city applications. The paper also proposes fault tolerance middleware services for fog computing to help solve reliability and fault tolerance issues. These services can provide a more reliable environment to operate IoT-based smart city applications.