A Resource Identity Management Strategy for Combined Fog-to-Cloud Systems

Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) is an emerging architecture intended to manage the resources continuum from far datacenters up to the near edge, putting together the cloud and fog concepts. It aims to obtain both, an efficient utilization of the entire set of available resources and an optimal execution of highly demanding services, supported by the deployment of highly skilled IoT devices at the edge. Many research efforts are pushing for the creation of a widely accepted F2C framework architecture aimed at controlling and managing the resources integrating the F2C network in a hierarchical and distributed fashion. To that end however, many research challenges remain unsolved. This paper puts the focus on one of these challenges, particularly the identity management and proposes a novel strategy that, based on fragmenting the full resource identifier, uses portions of the full resource name to identify the resources in the network without losing the uniqueness property. The presented results show that by using fragments instead of the full identifier, the lookup time and database size in the F2C aggregator nodes are both notably reduced, what undoubtedly enables a fast resource identification.