Fog Computing

T he Internet has witnessed two radical changes in the past decade: rapidly growing cloud computing and pervasive mobile devices. Motivated by these two trends, a plethora of research has been conducted to support mobile cloud computing, which bridges the cloud and mobile devices by leveraging both the powerful computing capability of the cloud and the mobility support of mobile devices. Much of the work has been focused on how to effectively off load computation-intensive tasks from resource-constrained devices to the cloud and get the results back promptly. However, because of f requent ly unpredictable network latency, especially in a mobile environment, often cloud computing can’t meet the stringent requirements of latency-, securityand privacy-sensitive, or geographically constrained applications. On the other hand, the growing amount of data generated by end devices and systems often can become impractical or resourceprohibitive to transport over networks to remote clouds. To this end, a new diagram, fog computing, has emerged. Fog computing will distribute advanced computing, storage, networking, and management services closer to end users along the continuum, from the cloud to things and devices, thus forming a distributed and virtualized platform. Thus, it is also referred to as edge computing.