Fog computing and Internet of things:
An Overview of Research Opportunities
Milan M. Panchal, Applied instruments, L.D. Engineering College, Ahmedabad.
Abstract --Internet of Things (IoT) brings more than an
explosive proliferation of endpoints. Despite the broad
utilization of cloud computing, some applications and
services still cannot benefit from this popular computing
paradigm due to inherent problems of cloud computing such
as unacceptable latency, lack of mobility support and
location-awareness. It is disruptive in several ways. In this
paper we examine those disruptions, and propose a
hierarchical distributed architecture that extends from the
edge of the network to the core nicknamed Fog Computing
Fog is an emergent architecture for computing, storage,
control, and networking that distributes these services closer
to end users along the cloud-to-things continuum. Fog
Computing extends the Cloud Computing paradigm to the
edge of the network, thus enabling a new breed of
applications and services.
Index Terms—Edge computing, edge networking, edge
storage, fog, fog computing, fog control, fog networking,
fog storage, Internet of Things (IoT).
1. Introduction
The Internet of Things (IoT) shall be able to incorporate
transparently and seamlessly a large number of different and
heterogeneous end systems, while providing open access to
selected subsets of data for the development of a plethora of
digital services. Building a general architecture for the IoT
is hence a very complex task, mainly because of the
extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies,
and services that may be involved in such a system.
Over the past decade, moving computing, control, and
data storage into the cloud has been an important trend.
In particular, computing, storage, and network
management functions are shifted to centralized data
centers, backbone IP networks, and cellular core
networks. Today, however, cloud computing is
encountering growing challenges in meeting many
new requirements in the Internet of Things (IoT).
An emerging wave of Internet deployments, most notably
the Internet of Things (IoTs), requires mobility support and
geo-distribution in addition to location awareness and low
latency. We argue that a new platform is needed to meet
these requirements; a platform we call Fog Computing, Fog,
simply because the fog is a cloud close to the ground.
The Fog is an architecture that distributes computation,
communication, control and storage closer to the end
users along the cloud-to-things continuum. Sometimes
the term “fog” is used interchangeably with the term
“edge,” although fog is broader than the typical notion
of edge. The relevance of fog/edge is rooted in both
the inadequacy of the traditional cloud and the
emergence of new opportunities for the Internet of
Things, 5G and embedded artificial intelligence.
Fog Computing enables a new breed of applications and
services, and that there is a fruitful interplay between the
Cloud and the Fog, particularly when it comes to data
management and analytics. Fog Computing extends the
Cloud Computing paradigm to the edge of the network.
While Fog and Cloud use the same resources (networking,
compute, and storage), and share many of the same
mechanisms and attributes.
The Internet of things (IoT) will be the Internet of future, as
we have seen a huge increase in wearable technology, smart
grid, smart home/city, smart connected vehicles.
This paper is organized as follows. In the second section we
introduce the Fog Computing paradigm, delineate its
characteristics, and those of the platform that supports Fog
services. The following sections will take the range of new
challenges in the emerging IoT and the difficulty to address
these challenges with today’s computing and networking
models. It then discusses why we will need a new
architecture—fog for computing, storage, networking, and
control—and how it can fill the technology gaps and create
new business opportunities.
2. The fog computing platform
"Fog Computing" is a highly virtualized platform that
provides compute, storage, and networking services between
end devices and traditional Cloud Computing Data Centers,
typically, but not exclusively located at the edge of network.
The following figure (a) presents the idealized information
and computing architecture supporting the future IoT
applications, and illustrates the role of Fog Computing.
Cloud and Fog are built around the same basic services.
“Edge of the Network”, however, implies a number of
characteristics that make the Fog a non-trivial extension of
the Cloud. The fog extends the cloud to be closer to the
things that produce and act on IoT data.
These devices, called fog nodes, can be deployed anywhere
with a network connection: on a factory floor, on top of a
power pole,

Fig (a)
There are a few terms similar to fog computing, such as
mobile cloud computing, mobile edge computing, etc.
1)Local Cloud: Local cloud is a cloud built in a local
network. It consists of cloud-enabling software running on
local servers and mostly supports interplay with remote
cloud. Local cloud is complementary to remote cloud by
running dedicated services locally to enhance the control of
data privacy.
2) Cloudlet: Cloudlet is “a data center in a box”, which
follows cloud computing paradigm in a more concentrated
manner and relies on high-volume servers. Cloudlet focuses
more on providing services to delay-sensitive, bandwidth
limited applications in vicinity.
3) Mobile Edge Computing: Mobile edge computing is very
similar to Cloudlet except that it is primarily located in
mobile base stations.
4) Mobile Cloud Computing: Mobile cloud computing
(MCC) is an infrastructure where both data storage and data
processing happen outside of mobile devices, by outsourcing
computations and data storage from mobile phones to cloud.
With the trend of pushing cloud to the edge, MCC starts to
evolve to mobile edge computing.
5) Fog Computing: Fog computing is generally considered
as a non-trivial extension of cloud computing from the core
network to the edge network. offers a comprehensive
definition of fog computing, which arise from challenges
and technologies that will shape the fog, with emphasis on
some prominent properties, such as predominance of
wireless access ,heterogeneity and geographical distribution,
sand-boxed environment and flexible interoperability, and
large scale of nodes.
3. New challenges in iot requires New architecture
The emerging IoT introduces many new challenges that
cannot be adequately addressed by today’s cloud and host
computing models alone. Here, we discuss several such
fundamental challenges.
a. Stringent Latency Requirements
Many industrial control systems, such as manufacturing
systems, smart grids, oil and gas systems, and goods
packaging systems, often demand that end-to-end latencies
alongside a railway track, in a vehicle, or on an oil rig. Any
device with computing, storage, and network connectivity
can be a fog node. Examples include industrial controllers,
switches, routers, embedded servers, and video surveillance
cameras.
between the sensor and the control node stay within a few
milliseconds . Many other IoT applications, such as vehicle-
to-vehicle communications, vehicle-to-roadside
communications, drone flight control applications, virtual
reality applications, gaming applications, and real-time
financial trading applications, may require latencies below a
few tens of milliseconds. These requirements fall far outside
what mainstream cloud services can achieve.
b. Network Bandwidth Constraints
The vast and rapidly growing number of connected things
is creating data at an exponential rate. Sending all the data to
the cloud will require prohibitively high network bandwidth.
It is often unnecessary or sometimes prohibited due to
regulations and data privacy concerns.
c. Resource-Constrained Devices
Many IoT devices will have severely limited resources.
Examples include sensors, data collectors, actuators,
controllers, surveillance cameras, cars, trains, drones, and
medical devices embedded in patients.
Many resource-constrained devices will not be able to rely
solely on their own limited resources to fulfill all their
computing needs. Requiring all of them to interact directly
with the cloud will be unrealistic and cost prohibitive as
well, because such interactions often require resource-
intensive processing and complex protocols.
d. Cyber-Physical Systems
As more cyber-physical systems are connected to the IoT,
the pendulum between the brick versus the click is starting
to swing back toward the brick again, where interactions,
and often times close integrations, between cyber systems
and physical systems are becoming increasingly important
and bring new business priorities and operational
requirements.
Therefore, a new computing and networking architecture
will be needed to reduce the needs for the hardware and
software in mission-critical systems to be updated over time.
e. Uninterrupted Services With Intermittent Connectivity
to the Cloud
Cloud services will have difficulty providing
uninterrupted services to devices and systems that have
intermittent network connectivity to the cloud. Such
devices include vehicles, drones, and oil rigs. For example,
an oil rig in the ocean and far away from shore may have
only satellite communication channels to connect to the
cloud. These satellite channels can suffer widely fluctuating
quality and intermittent availability.
f. New Security Challenges
Existing cyber security solutions for today’s Internet,
designed primarily for protecting enterprise networks, data
centers, and consumer electronics, have focused on updating applications. It will further provide a secure
providing perimeter-based protections. In particular, a execution environment for fog services and applications.
system or an individual device under protection is placed Fog will integrate with cloud to enable seamless
behind firewalls that work with intrusion detection and end-to-end services.
prevention systems to prevent security threats from breaking
through the protected perimeters. Some resource-intensive Fog main advantages is Cognition, Efficiency, Agility,
security functions are also being moved to the cloud. Latency.
Existing cloud-based security services continue to focus on
providing perimeter-based protection, such as redirecting Table-I describe how Fog helps address iot challenges ,
email and Web traffic to the clouds for threat detection, and
redirecting access control requests to the clouds for
authentication and authorization processing.

4. Main characteristics of fog and how it complements

cloud

1) Fog Enables a Service Continuum: Fog fills the gap

between the cloud and the things to enable a service
continuum. For example, to the wearable devices, a mobile
phone may become the fog to provide local control and
analytics applications to the wearable devices. When the
user is inside her vehicle, the vehicle can become the fog for
her mobile phone to allow many smartphone functions, such
as display, user interface, audio, phone book, to be moved to
the vehicle. Roadside traffic control equipment can in turn
serve as the fog for the vehicle to provide traffic information
to the vehicle.

2) Fog and Cloud Are Interdependent: For example,

cloud services may be used to manage the fog. Fog can act
as the proxy of the cloud to deliver cloud services to
endpoints, and act as the proxy of the endpoints to interact
with the cloud. Furthermore, fog can be the beachheads for
collecting and aggregating data for the cloud.

3) Fog and Cloud Are Mutually Beneficial: Some

functions are naturally more advantageous to be carried out
in the fog while others in the cloud. Determining which
functions should be carried out in the fog and how the fog
should interact with the cloud will be key aspects of fog
research and development.
Table-I
5. Fog Architectural Characteristics and
Advantages
6. Fog computing and the Internet of things
A common denominator underlying fog is that fog
In this section we demonstrate the role the Fog plays in
distributes the resources and services of computation,
various fields: Smart home, Connected vehicles, Wind farms
communication, control, and storage closer to the users. A
fog architectures may be fully distributed, mostly
Smart home
centralized, or somewhere in between. The fog architecture
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, more
and the applications it supports may be virtualized but may
and more smart devices and sensors are connected at home.
also be implemented in dedicated hardware and software.
However, products from different vendors are hard to work
A fog architecture will allow the same application to run
together. Some tasks, which require large amount of
anywhere, reducing the need for specialized applications
computation and storage, e.g. real-time video analytics, are
dedicated just for the cloud, just for the endpoints, or just for
infeasible due to the limited capability of hardware. To solve
the edge devices. It will enable applications from different
these problems, fog computing is utilized to integrate all
suppliers to run on the same physical platform without
debris into a single platform and empower those Smart
mutual interference. It will provide a common lifecycle
Home applications with elastic resources.
management framework for all applications, offering
capabilities for composing, configuring, dispatching,
activating and deactivating, adding and removing, and
To use home security application as an example, widely
deployed secure sensors consist of smart lock, video/audio
recorder, various sensor monitors.
Connected Vehicle (CV)
The Connected Vehicle deployment displays a rich scenario
of connectivity and interactions: cars to cars, cars to access
points (Wi-Fi, 3G,LTE, roadside units [RSUs], smart traffic
lights), and access points to access points. The Fog has a
number of attributes that make it the ideal platform to deliver
a rich menu of SCV services in infotainment, safety, traffic
support, and analytics: geo-distribution (throughout cities
and along roads), mobility and location awareness, low
latency, heterogeneity, and support for real-time
interactions.
A smart traffic light illustrates the latter. The smart traffic
light node interacts locally with a number of sensors, which
detect the presence of pedestrians and bikers, and measures
the distance and speed of approaching vehicles. It also
interacts with neighboring lights to coordinate the green
traffic wave. Based on this information the smart light sends
warning signals to approaching vehicles, and even modifies
its own cycle to prevent accidents. Re-coordinating with
neighboring STLs through the orchestration layer of the Fog
follows any modification of the cycle. The data collected by
the STLs is processed to do real-time analytics (changing,
for instance, the timing of the cycles in response to the traffic
conditions). The data from clusters of smart traffic lights is
sent to the Cloud for global, long-term analytics.
Wind farms
A wind farm offers a rich use case of Fog Computing, one
that brings up characteristics and requirements shared by a
number of Internet of Everything (IoE) deployments:
1.Interplay between real time analytics and batch analytics.
2. Tight interaction between sensors and actuators, in closed
control loops. 3. Wide geographical deployment of a large
system consistent of a number of autonomous yet
coordinated modules—which gives rise to the need of an
orchestrator.
7. Fog Interfaces With Cloud, Other Fogs, Things, and
End Users
Therefore, the interfaces for fog to interact with the cloud,
other fogs, and the things and users, as illustrated in
Fig.(b),must: 1) facilitate flexible, and in some cases
dynamic, relocation of the computing, storage, and control
functions among these different entities; 2) enable
convenient user access to fog services; and 3) allow efficient
and effective lifecycle management of the system and
services.
1) Fog-to-Cloud Interfaces: The fog–to-cloud interfaces will
be needed to support fog-cloud collaborations to provide
end-to-end services.
It will support functions to, for example, allow:
a) fog to be managed from the cloud;
b) fog and cloud to send data to each other;
c) cloud to distribute services onto fog;
d) cloud to provide services to fog;
e) cloud services to be provided through fog to things and
end users;
f) fog to provide services to cloud;
g) fog and cloud to collaborate with each other to deliver
end-to-end services.
It is essential to determine what information should be
passed across the fog–cloud interface, the frequency and
granularity of such information, and how the fog and the
cloud should react to the information.
Fig.(b)
2) Fog-to-Fog Interfaces: Different fog nodes or systems
may collaborate with each other to jointly support an
application. For example, multiple fog systems can share the
data storage and computing tasks for one or multiple users
or applications. Different fog nodes or systems can also
collaborate to serve as backups for each other. An important
question is therefore how to design the interface and
protocols to enable fog nodes in the same or different fog
systems to collaborate.
3) Fog-to-Thing/User Interfaces: Fog will provide services
to a wide range of end users and devices with widely varying
capabilities. The fog-to-thing interface and fog to- user
interface will be essential to allow things and end users to
access fog services in user-friendly, resource efficient, and
secure ways.
8. Conclusion
We have outlined the vision and defined key characteristics
of Fog Computing. A platform to applications at the edge
of the network. Fog is starting to reshape the future
landscape of multiple industries, example, End user
experience providers, Network operators, Network
equipment vendors, Cloud service providers, System
integrators, Edge device manufacturers, Client and IoT
device manufacturers, Computer chip suppliers. We
examined key aspects of Fog computing, and how Fog
complements and extends Cloud computing.
9. Acknowledgment
I am grateful for the inspiring conversations with colleagues
from my college as well as faculties of college.

10. References
[1] Mung Chiang, Fellow, IEEE, and Tao Zhang, Fellow,
IEEE,” Fog and IoT: An Overview of Research
Opportunities”, IEEE internet of things journal, vol. 3, no. 6,
pp. 854-864, december 2016
[2] Flavio Bonomi, Rodolfo Milito, Jiang Zhu, and Sateesh
Addepalli, Cisco System Inc.,” Fog Computing and Its Role
in the Internet of Things”, pp. 1-5
[3] Flavio Bonomi, Rodolfo Milito, Preethi Natarajan and
Jiang Zhu, Enterprise Networking Labs, Cisco Systems Inc.,
San Jose, USA , “Fog Computing: A Platform for Internet of
Things and Analytics”, pp. 169-186.
[4] Andrea Zanella, Senior Member, IEEE, Nicola Bui,
Angelo Castellani, Lorenzo Vangelista, Senior Member,
IEEE, and Michele Zorzi, Fellow, IEEE, “Internet of Things
for Smart Cities”, IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS
JOURNAL, VOL. 1, NO. 1, pp. 22-32, FEBRUARY 2014,
[5] Mahesh Lakshminarasimhan, Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, Sri Krishna College of
Engineering & Technology, “Advanced Traffic
Management System Using Internet of Things”, pp. 1-10.
[6] Shanhe Yi, Zijiang Hao, Zhengrui Qin, and Qun Li, Dept
of Computer Science, The College of William and Mary,
“Fog Computing: Platform and Applications”, 2015 Third
IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and
Technologies, pp.73-78.