Fog Intelligence for Secure Smart Villages: Architecture and Future Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is considered the foundation for next-generation smart villages due to its ability to use sustainable information and communication technologies. The smart villages can enable real-time data analytics and can automate decision-making for local villagers in terms of agriculture, health care, transportation, environment, and energy. However, most of the wireless sensing devices exchange information using public networks and therefore may not be able to resist all forms of attacks. In addition, most of the IoT devices are resource restricted and use cloud servers to process and store data. However, when IoT devices communicate with cloud computing data centers, the volume of data causes network congestion. To provide efficient and secure services, a new network architecture named distributed fog computing (DFC) can be created and integrated with the IoT-based smart villages deployment. Motivated from the aforementioned discussions, this article explores the integration of DFC with IoT in improving security and privacy solutions for consumer electronic devices used by villages. As a case study, we also design and evaluate the performance of an intrusion detection system in a DFC-based smart village environment. Finally, we discuss several open security issues and challenges regarding Fog-to-Things enabled smart villages.