Drone-Assisted Fog-Cloud IoT Content Service Platform for Rural Communities

Although social media and contents are being generated and shared with an unprecedented scale and speed, rural and underdeveloped areas throughout the world have only limited access due to the lack of high-speed Internet. Connecting rural communities to the digital world and providing them with right contents will provide the much-needed bridge between urban and rural areas. In this paper, we propose a communication and information framework that utilizes simple Internet of Things (IoT) in a rural community to assist delay-tolerant content distribution. Specifically, a hybrid fog-cloud content distribution network is constructed by deploying low-end simple fog nodes and utilizing the movement of community vehicles. Moreover, drones are used to distribute content on demand as a compliment of the delay tolerant network for better delivery rate and lower delay time. A novel drone scheduling algorithm is proposed to plan drones’ tours optimally. Extensive simulation experiments have been performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.