Sustainable Green Fog Computing for Smart Agriculture

The evolution of information age coupled with the exponential growth of computing devices paved the way for the concept of seamless connectivity. Since the traditional computing model was inadequate to cope up with the demands of seamless connectivity, cloud computing paradigm emerged as the dominant computing model offering round the clock services to millions of users throughout the globe. Despite its obvious advantages, cloud computing model is a major contributor of global warming due to ever increasing carbon emissions of huge Data Centers that hosts voluminous data. The cloud computing model bears calamitous results for clean environment. The fog computing model is relatively a new trend in computing domain that can successfully augment cloud computing model with more environmentally friendly technology. Fog computing can also play a pivotal role in the growth of smart agriculture due to its small carbon footprint. In this paper we present a green fog based architecture comprising of Single Board Computers acting as low power consuming fog nodes, for processing data from IoT sensors, specifically for agriculture sector. The low energy requirements of the proposed system can be easily met with the inclusion of renewable energy resources, thus creating a more sustainable system. The proposed green fog based architecture shall play a positive role in the creation of green environment not only for smart agriculture sector but also for other application areas as well.