Fog Computing: The Essential Catalyst for Optimising the True Potential of Cloud-Based Internet of Things

Abstract

With the rise and accretion of smart devices, particularly mobile phones, wearable gadgets and sensors, it brings us to a new era of computing technology known as Internet of things (IoT) to many. The IoT includes smart machines interacting with other machines, environments and infrastructures, which results massive increase in the volume of digitally generated data. To alleviate the burden of limited storage capacity of a device, cloud computing is considered a growing paradigm, which provides on-demand storage and other services to the end user. However, despite the numerous applications where cloud helps in accelerating the IoT growth around physical world, there are some application scenarios still not getting benefits from this emerging computing platform. Some of cloud computing fundamental problems like unacceptable latency, incapable for location awareness services, lack of mobility support, unnecessary network bandwidth consumption and undefined security issues from third party and others are reasons for its rejection in some interactive and real-time applications. To conquer this issue, Cisco defines a new uprising computing perspective named fog computing, which extends cloud computing to the edge of networks, which create scope for new applications and services for billions of connected devices. This research article is divided into three parts, in the first part, the author has enlighten the concept of IoT and discusses why cloud computing is considered an important success boosting factor behind the popularity of IoT. The second part discusses the concept of fog computing, and its need and motivation along with its main characteristics. In the last part, a general model of fog infrastructure is presented, which explains the types of application that can take benefits from fog computing, and finally, conclusion of the paper is provided.