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Fog Computing

Kupat Tahu Presentation

CHAPTER-7
FOG COMPUTING

Objectives:

• To discuss and understand fog computing its advantages and fog

based IoT architecture
• To discuss advance computing paradigm

Learning Outcomes:
At the end of this lesson the students will be able to understand:

• What the fog computing is

• Fog based IoT environment
PREVIOUS LECTURE CONTENTS
• Traditional IoT vs Cloud based IoT (cont..)
LECTURE CONTENTS
• Fog computing
• Advantages
• Reference architecture
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FOG COMPUTING: Introduction

• IoT environments need Big Stream and Big Data for effective real-time analytics and
decision making.

• Cloud computing offers a solution that supports Big Data Processing.

• However, when data sources are distributed across multiple locations and low latency is
indispensable, in-cloud data processing fails to meet the requirements.

• Centralized cloud servers cannot deal with flows with such velocity in real time.

• Many users due to privacy concerns, are not comfortable to transfer and store activity-track-
data into the cloud.

• Need for an alternative paradigm that is capable of bringing the computation to more
computationally capable devices that are geographically closer to the sensors than to the
clouds, and that have connectivity to the Internet.
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• Devices, which are at the edge of the network and therefore referred to as edge devices, can
build local views of data flows and can aggregate data to be sent to the cloud for further
offline analysis.

• Fog computing bridges the gap between the cloud and end devices (e.g., IoT nodes) by
enabling computing, storage, networking, and data management on network nodes within
the close vicinity of IoT devices.

• Fog computing is making use of decentralized servers in between network core and
network edge for data processing and to serve the immediate requirements of the end
systems.

• Fog computing is a distributed computing paradigm that extends the cloud services to the
edge of the network

• Fog nodes can be deployed anywhere with a network connection: on a factory floor, on top
of a power pole, 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.
Fog computing 7

• “a horizontal system-level architecture that distributes computing, storage, control and

networking functions closer to the users along a cloud-to-thing continuum. ”

• The “horizontal ”platform in fog computing allows computing functions to be distributed

between different platforms and industries, whereas a vertical platform promotes siloed
applications.

• A vertical platform may provide strong sup- port for a single type of application (silo), but it
does not account for platform-to-platform interaction in other vertically focused platforms.

• In addition to facilitating a horizontal architecture, fog computing provides a flexible

platform to meet the data-driven needs of operators and users. Fog computing is intended
to provide strong support for the Internet of Things.
Advantages 8

• For applications that need low latency with a wide and dense geographical
distribution

• Fog computing supports

 Mobility
 computing resources
 communication protocols
 interface heterogeneity
 cloud integration
 and distributed data analytics
Fog computing and the Internet of Things 9

Because cloud computing is not viable for many internet of things (IoT)
applications, fog computing is often used. Its distributed approach addresses
the needs of IoT and industrial IoT (IIoT), as well as the immense amount of
data smart sensors and IoT devices generate, which would be costly and time-
consuming to send to the cloud for processing and analysis.

Fog computing reduces the bandwidth needed and reduces the back-and-
forth communication between sensors and the cloud, which can negatively
affect IoT performance.
Advantages 10

Advantages associated with Fog computing including the following:

Reduction of network traffic:

• It is inefficient to send all raw data collected by sensors to the cloud.

• Fog computing benefits here by providing a platform for filter and analysis
of the data generated by these devices close to the edge, and for generation
of local data views.

• This drastically reduces the traffic being sent to the cloud.

Advantages 11

Low-latency requirement:
• Mission-critical applications require real-time data processing.
• Some of the best examples of such applications are cloud robotics, or
antilock brakes on a vehicle.
• For a robot, motion control depends on the data collected by the sensors
and the feedback of the control system.
• Having the control system running on the cloud may make the sense-
process-actuate loop slow or unavailable as a result of communication
failures.
• This is where fog computing helps, by performing the processing required
for the control system very close to the robots—thus making real-time
response possible.
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Advantages

Scalability:
• Even with virtually infinite resources, the cloud may become the
bottleneck if all the raw data generated by end devices is continually sent
to it.
• Since fog computing aims at processing incoming data closer to the data
source itself
• It reduces the burden of that processing on the cloud, thus addressing the
scalability issues arising out of the increasing number of endpoints.
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Advantages

Suitable for IoT tasks and queries:

• With the increasing number of smart devices, most of the requests relate
to the surroundings of the device.
• Hence, such requests can be served without the help of the global
information present at the cloud.
• Example can be a smart-connected vehicle which needs to capture events
only about a hundred meters from it.
• Fog computing makes the communication distance closer to the physical
distance by bringing the processing closer to the edge of the network.
REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE 14

Fast-emerging three-tier architecture for futuristic computing.

The digitized objects (sensors, beacons, etc.) at the lowest level are generating and
capturing polystructured data in big quantities.

The fog devices (gateways, controllers, etc.) at the second level are reasonably blessed
with computational, communication, and storage power in order to mix, mingle, and
merge with other fog devices in the environment to ingest and accomplish the local or
proximate data processing to emit viable and value-adding insights in time.
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The third and final levels are the far away cloud centers.
Fog devices act as intelligent intermediaries between cloud-based cyber/virtual
applications and sensor/actuator data at the ground level.
Fog device-based and Cloud-based data analytics
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