Analyzing the Deployment Challenges of Beacon Stuffing as a Discovery Enabler in Fog-to-Cloud Systems

n order to meet the needs of emerging IoT applications having tight QoS constraints, new computing paradigms have been proposed, bringing computation resources closer to the edge of the network, where IoT resides. One of such paradigms is Fog-to-Cloud (F2C), defined as a framework where the combined use of fog and cloud resources is coordinated and managed in an optimized manner to achieve the desired service requirements. Unlike cloud computing, the fog provides a heterogeneous set of resources, possibly within fixed deployments provided by city managers, or that could even be contributed by end users. This brings in many challenges yet to be addressed such as resource discovery, which is the focus of this paper. This paper digs into the utilization of 802.11 beacon stuffing as a possible solution allowing the discovery of nearby devices in an F2C system, particularly dealing with specific design and implementation details of the proposed solution and more importantly its real applicability to an F2C system through the analysis of several experiments carried out on a real world testbed.