The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is the future of the Internet, where everything will be connected. Studies have revealed that Fog/Edge Computing (FEC)-based services will play a major role in extending the cloud by carrying out intermediary services at the edge of the network. Fog/Edge Computing-based IoT’s (FECIoT) distributed architecture enhances service provisioning along the Cloud-to-Things continuum, thereby making it suitable for mission-critical applications. Furthermore, the proximity of fog/edge devices to where the data is produced makes it stand-out in terms of resource allocation, service delivery, and privacy. From the business perspective, FECIoT will lead to a boom and spring up of small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), thereby encouraging inclusion for all. To this end, we present a comprehensive survey on state-of-the-art IoT literature over the period 2008-2018 and propose the FECIoT framework which covers the enabling technologies, services, and open research issues. A tutorial approach is employed, progressing from basic to more advanced concepts within the IoT domain. Lastly, we show how FECIoT can be deployed in real-life Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) such as the intelligent transportation system, smart grid, smart health-care, smart homes, and smart environment.

Recently, named data networking (NDN) has been proposed as a promising architecture for future Internet technologies. NDN is an extension to the content-centric network (CCN) and is expected to support various applications in vehicular communications [vehicular NDN (VNDN)]. VNDN basically relies on naming the content rather than using end-to-end device names. In VNDN, a vehicle broadcasts an “Interest” packet for the required “content,” regardless of end-to-end connectivity with servers or other vehicles and known as a “consumer.” In response, a vehicle with the content replies to the Interest packet with a “Data” packet and named as a “provider.” However, the simple VNDN architecture faces several challenges such as consumer/provider mobility and Interest/Data packet(s) forwarding. In VNDN, for the most part, the Data packet is sent along the reverse path of the related Interest packet. However, there is no extensive simulated reference available in the literature to support this argument. In this paper, therefore, we first analyze the propagation behavior of Interest and Data packets in the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) environment through extensive simulations. Second, we propose the “CODIE” scheme to control the Data flooding/broadcast storm in the naïve VNDN. The main idea is to allow the consumer vehicle to start hop counter in Interest packet. Upon receiving this Interest by any potential provider, a data dissemination limit (DDL) value stores the number of hops and a data packet needs to travel back. Simulation results show that CODIE forwards fewer copies of data packets processed (CDPP) while achieving similar interest satisfaction rate (ISR), as compared with the naïve VNDN. In addition, we also found that CODIE also minimizes the overall interest satisfaction delay (ISD), respectively.

Vehicular Content-Centric Network (VCCN) has emerged as a future network technology for vehicular networks, where the focus of communication is shifted from the host to information centric. However, VCCN faces several challenges, including interest/data packet(s) flooding, provider/consumer mobility, and so on. In this letter, we propose a scheme named RobUst Forwarder Selection (RUFS) to mitigate the interest broadcast storm. In RUFS, each vehicle shares its satisfied interest(s) statistics with neighbors. All neighbors store this information in their Neighbors Satisfied List (NSL), which helps to select the potential interest forwarder. Simulation results show that RUFS outperforms the recently proposed NAIF, DR based and basic interest forwarding in VCCN.

A smart city enhances the quality of its citizens' lives by providing ease of access to ubiquitous services through integration using communication systems at the foundation. Additionally, ITS plays a major role in making a metropolitan area into a smart city. The current IP-based solutions for ITS have slanted the performance due to high demand for data on the move, especially when the consumers become the producers. Meanwhile, NDN has evolved as a promising future Internet architecture and is being investigated extensively. In this article, we discuss the core functionality of NDN followed by our new architecture proposed for ITS in smart cities. Also, we highlight the current and future research challenges for NDN-enabled ITS in the context of smart cities.

Smart cities have been envisioned during the last decade. Moreover, various projects have been initiated to bring this concept into reality. Smart city is basically an emergence of the existing and new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to make our living standard more safe and digitized. Wireless communications, such as sensors, actuators, intelligent transportation systems, and smart grids, have played a vital role in the dissemination of information under the given circumstances. Similarly, it is hard to declare any city as a smart city without taking benefits from wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, with new requirements and delay sensitive applications, the existing WSN requires significant alterations at several layers. In this paper, a new time division multiple access (TDMA)-based medium access control (MAC) protocol, called bitmap-assisted efficient and scalable TDMA-based MAC (BEST-MAC), is proposed for adaptive traffic in hierarchical WSNs that can be deployed in the smart cities. BEST-MAC is specifically designed to improve the quality control of such smart cities applications, where diverse traffic is required and loss or delay in data traffic is unacceptable. The main contributions of BEST-MAC include: 1) it uses small size time slots; 2) the number of those time slots is more than the number of member nodes; 3) knapsack algorithm is used to schedule time slots; and 4) short node address (1 B) is proposed to identify the member nodes. First two contributions of BEST-MAC handle adaptive traffic loads of all members in an efficient manner. The knapsack algorithm not only reduces the job completion time of a node but also minimizes the average packet delay with better link utilization. The short node address reduces the control overhead that improves the energy efficiency. The simulation results verify that the proposed BEST-MAC transmits more data with less delay and energy consumption compared with the existing MAC protocols.

Named data networking and software defined networking share mutual courage in changing legacy networking architectures. In the case of NDN, IP-based communication has been tackled by naming the data or content itself, while SDN proposes to decouple the control and data planes to make various services manageable without physical interference with switches and routers. Both NDN and SDN also support communication via heterogeneous interfaces and have been recently investigated for vehicular networks. Naive VNs are based on the IP-based legacy, which is prone to several issues due to the dynamic network topology among other factors. In this article, we first see both SDN and NDN enabled VNs from a bird's eye view, and for the very first time, we present an architecture that combines SDN functionalities within VNs to retrieve the required content using NDN. Moreover, we discuss a number of current research challenges and provide a precise roadmap that can be considered for the research community to jointly address such challenges.