Airborne fog computing framework: instant primers and design choices

This article focuses on the challenge of providing services and applications by a swarm of mobile flying devices, which may belong to the same tenant or not. Starting by introducing the concepts of mobile edge computing and fog computing, this work shows how the latter can be leveraged to create a novel framework of airborne fog computing. This article defines the applicability, design principles, and challenges inherent to such a framework, starting by showing how the technical challenges can be tackled based on the combination of three different networking paradigms: opportunistic networking, information-centric networking, and software-defined networking. This article shows how these three networking paradigms can be combined to define an airborne fog computing framework based on the notion of in-network computing dynamically programming the data plane to support the execution of services and the integration of the paradigms, in which services are defined as chains of computational functions that are dynamically installed and executed in different flying devices.