Value-of-Information Middleware Solutions for Fog and Edge Computing

Fog and Edge Computing aim to deliver low-latency, immersive, and powerful services by processing information close to both devices and users. This is well suited for IoT applications in Smart City, where IoT gateways, Cloudlets, Base Stations, and other computational nodes can process (part of) the data generated by the multitude of IoT sensors directly at the edge of the network. However, the implementation of Fog and Edge Computing is challenging because it requires to deal with a (limited number of) constrained devices, dynamic services’ requirements, and heterogeneous network conditions. Differently from the Cloud, where computational resources are supposed to be unlimited, Fog and Edge services should be capable to adapt to scarce and constrained resources and deal with the deluge of IoT data. To facilitate the adoption of Fog and Edge Computing this work proposes middleware solutions that leverage Value-of-Information (VoI) as interesting criterion to select only the most valuable piece of information for processing and dissemination and to scale computational workload in an automated fashion.