Floating Fog: extending fog computing to vast waters for aerial users

Abstract

There are thousands of flights carrying millions of passengers each day, having three or more Internet-connected devices with them on average. Usually, onboard devices remain idle for most of the journey (which can be of several hours), therefore, we can tap on their underutilized potential. Although these devices are generally becoming more and more resourceful, for complex services (such as related to machine learning, augmented/virtual reality, smart healthcare, and so on) those devices do not suffice standalone. This makes a case for multi-device resource aggregation such as through femto-cloud. As our first contribution, we present the utility of femto-cloud for aerial users. But for that sake, a reliable and faster Internet is required (to access online services or cloud resources), which is currently not the case with satellite-based Internet. That is the second challenge we try to address in our paper, by presenting an adaptive beamforming-based solution for aerial Internet provisioning. However, on average, most of the flight path is above waters. Given that, we propose that beamforming transceivers can be docked on stationery ships deployed in the vast waters (such as the ocean). Nevertheless, certain services would be delay-sensitive, and accessing their on-ground servers or cloud may not be feasible (in terms of delay). Similarly, certain complex services may require resources in addition to the flight-local femto-cloud. That is the third challenge we try to tackle in this paper, by proposing that the traditional fog computing (which is a cloud-like but localized pool of resources) can also be extended to the waters on the ships harboring beamforming transceivers. We name it Floating Fog. In addition to that, Floating Fog will enable several new services such as live black-box. We also present a cost and bandwidth analysis to highlight the potentials of Floating Fog. Lastly, we identify some challenges to tackle the successful deployment of Floating Fog.

Keywords: Aerial users; Cloud computing; Edge computing; Fog computing; Marine fog.