Security and privacy-awareness in a software-defined fog computing network for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Issues of high energy costs and a time delay factor currently pose a considerable challenge to the success of the Internet of Things (IoT). Accordingly, fog computing (fog-C) has been introduced as a new paradigm to address both the high bandwidth cost and time delay issues that can result from transmitting sensing data all the way to centralized cloud servers. In addition, the optical fog-C network has been introduced to improve packet transmission among a group of connected fog nodes to support services to the end-user, with a minimum time delay. However, since network traffic management issues, such as building a network topology for supporting network traffic rules, have not been systematically recognized in optical or wireless fog-C, the fog-C network system itself is still not sufficiently dynamic to completely address these energy costs and latency issues. Thus, many studies have been suggested to integrate a software defined network (SDN) into the fog-C network system to present a software defined fog-C (SDFC) network architecture in order to eliminate the aforementioned issues associated with IoT applications. However, integrating the SDN with the fog-C system may generally result in introducing specific security and privacy challenges to the fog-C network topology system due to its distinctive features. This paper will review the overall promising advantages of SDFC networks, with a consideration of security and privacy threats associated with the fog-C network topology as well as possible solutions.