Towards Distributed Data Management in Fog Computing

Abstract

In the emerging area of the Internet of Things (IoT), the exponential growth of the number of smart devices leads to a growing need for efficient data storage mechanisms. Cloud Computing was an efficient solution so far to store and manipulate such huge amount of data. However, in the next years it is expected that Cloud Computing will be unable to handle the huge amount of the IoT devices efficiently due to bandwidth limitations. An arising technology which promises to overwhelm many drawbacks in large-scale networks in IoT is Fog Computing. Fog Computing provides high-quality Cloud services in the physical proximity of mobile users. Computational power and storage capacity could be offered from the Fog, with low latency and high bandwidth. This survey discusses the main features of Fog Computing, introduces representative simulators and tools, highlights the benefits of Fog Computing in line with the applications of large-scale IoT networks, and identifies various aspects of issues we may encounter when designing and implementing social IoT systems in the context of the Fog Computing paradigm. The rationale behind this work lies in the data storage discussion which is performed by taking into account the importance of storage capabilities in modern Fog Computing systems. In addition, we provide a comprehensive comparison among previously developed distributed data storage systems which consist of a promising solution for data storage allocation in Fog Computing.