Binary Reed-Solomon Coding Based Distributed Storage Scheme in Information-Centric Fog Networks

Fog computing is an emerging architecture for processing, storing, and controlling the data at the edge of the networks, which is becoming a popular technology for Internet of Things (IoT). As a next-generation networking architecture, Information-Centric Network (ICN) has been introduced into networked fogs to establish efficient data exchange based on name, caching, content features, etc., which gives the IoT an opportunity to store the huge geo-distributed data at the edge of the networks and be less dependent on the Cloud, thus fulfilling the delay-sensitive needs of the end-users. Nevertheless, efficient distributed storage is a must for information-centric fog networks, because of the huge content exchange and geo-distributed data. To address this, this paper proposes an efficient storage scheme by integrating Binary Reed-Solomon erasure code with ICN mechanism in fog networks. Specifically, the data are encoded into named data blocks and are distributed as well as stored into distributed fog nodes. The fog network performs information-centered with horizontal fog-to-fog communications to retrieve the data blocks efficiently. Moreover, the data is then recovered even with some of the data blocks missing, thus ensuring the reliability of storage at distributed fogs. Simulation results show the efficiency and advantages of the proposed distributed storage scheme.