The Fog Computing: Characteristics and Future Directions

Abstract: In the last decade, moving computing, control, data storage, and processing to the cloud has been a major trend. But due to the rapidly increasing number of Internet of Things IoT devices/sensors over the world, the cloud was encountered many troubles and limitations, such as high latency, poor quality of service, and location awareness, especially for real-time applications that needs interactivity and fast response. To support this computational demand of real-time latency-sensitive applications of largely geo-distributed IoT devices/sensors, a new computing paradigm named Fog Computing has been introduced [1]. Fog computing is a novel technology that extends and supports cloud computing to reach the optimal performance in the network. Fog computing is acting by pushing the computing and services to the edge of the network. In this paper, we will introduce the Fog Computing term, its architecture is explained, the characteristics are discussed, a comparison with Cloud Computing is examined, and future research directions are mentioned.

Keywords: Fog, Cloud, Computing, Internet-of-Things, IoT, Latency, Bandwidth, Real-Time Application