Coding for Distributed Fog Computing

TL;DR

This paper explores how coding techniques can leverage redundancy in Fog networks to reduce bandwidth and latency, introducing frameworks that balance computation speed and communication efficiency.

Contribution

It reviews and unifies coding strategies like Minimum Bandwidth and Minimum Latency Codes for Fog computing, proposing a tradeoff framework for system optimization.

Findings

Coding reduces bandwidth and latency in Fog networks

Unified framework enables tradeoff between latency and communication load

Potential for optimizing Fog system performance

Abstract

Redundancy is abundant in Fog networks (i.e., many computing and storage points) and grows linearly with network size. We demonstrate the transformational role of coding in Fog computing for leveraging such redundancy to substantially reduce the bandwidth consumption and latency of computing. In particular, we discuss two recently proposed coding concepts, namely Minimum Bandwidth Codes and Minimum Latency Codes, and illustrate their impacts in Fog computing. We also review a unified coding framework that includes the above two coding techniques as special cases, and enables a tradeoff between computation latency and communication load to optimize system performance. At the end, we will discuss several open problems and future research directions.