Fog computing : principles, architectures, and applications

The Internet of Everything (IoE) solutions gradually bring every object online, and processing data in a centralized cloud does not scale to requirements of such an environment. This is because there are applications such as health monitoring and emergency response that require low latency, so delay caused by transferring data to the cloud and then back to the application can seriously impact the performance. To this end, Fog computing has emerged, where cloud computing is extended to the edge of the network to decrease the latency and network congestion. Fog computing is a paradigm for managing a highly distributed and possibly virtualized environment that provides compute and network services between sensors and cloud data centers. This chapter provides a background and motivations regarding the emergence of Fog computing, and defines its key characteristics. In addition, a reference architecture for Fog computing is presented, and recent related development and applications are discussed.