An Extension of the MiSCi Middleware for Smart Cities Based on Fog Computing

Abstract

In a Smart City is required computational platforms, which allow environments with multiple interconnected and embedded systems, where the technology is integrated with the people, and can respond to unpredictable situations. One of the biggest challenges in developing Smart City is how to describe and dispose of enormous and multiple sources of information, and how to share and merge it into a single infrastructure. In previous works, we have proposed an Autonomic Reflective Middleware with emerging and ubiquitous capabilities, which is based on intelligent agents that can be adapted to the existing dynamism in a city for, ubiquitously, respond to the requirements of citizens, using emerging ontologies that allow the adaptation to the context. In this work, we extend this middleware using the fog computing paradigm, to solve this problem. The fog extends the cloud to be closer to the things that produce and act on the smart city. In this paper, we present the extension to the middleware, and examples of utilization in different situations in a smart city.

Fog computing for the integration of agents and web services in an autonomic reflexive middleware

“…In addition, these works have weaknesses, such as the fact of not being FIPA-compliant, or not allow bidirectional communication of agents and services. That is why in [19], [21] has been proposed a new architecture to solve those issues. In particular, this article studies the performance of the incorporation of the fog-computing paradigm to our middleware, which allows agents not only to communicate with services transparently, but also to use the fog paradigm in an autonomous way.…”

“…This section describes the architecture of the Middleware for Smart Cities called MiSCi, proposed in [19], [21].…”

“…1). Each element of this architecture provides essential features to the middleware, enabling the ubiquity, the context awareness, the ontological emergence, smart decisions, fog and cloud computing, among others things (refer to [3], [4], [21] for more details). In general, the layers of MiSCi are:…”

“…FogA uses a metaontology provided by the OEL Layer, some context information provided by the CAL layer, and some system information collected by the System Monitor Agent (SMonA), about the level of occupation in terms of processing and communication (bandwidth) of the agents and local web services. Using all that information, FogA can make a decision about whether or not the data should be processed locally or in the cloud (see [21] for details).…”

“…The distinguishing fog characteristics are its proximity to end-users, its dense geographical distribution, and its support for mobility. Consequently, in [21] we have shown how the incorporation of a Fog layer in MiSCi can deal with the real time and low latency issues in a Smart City.…”