A Comprehensive Survey on Fog Computing: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges

TL;DR

This survey reviews the current state of fog computing, highlighting its role as a complementary paradigm to cloud computing that addresses latency and SLA challenges by enabling edge processing.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of fog computing architectures, algorithms, challenges, and future research directions, emphasizing its importance in emerging technologies.

Findings

Fog computing reduces latency for real-time applications.

It enhances SLA compliance by processing data closer to end devices.

Fog computing complements cloud services, not replaces them.

Abstract

Cloud computing with its three key facets (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) and its inherent advantages (e.g., elasticity and scalability) still faces several challenges. The distance between the cloud and the end devices might be an issue for latency-sensitive applications such as disaster management and content delivery applications. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) may also impose processing at locations where the cloud provider does not have data centers. Fog computing is a novel paradigm to address such issues. It enables provisioning resources and services outside the cloud, at the edge of the network, closer to end devices or eventually, at locations stipulated by SLAs. Fog computing is not a substitute for cloud computing but a powerful complement. It enables processing at the edge while still offering the possibility to interact with the cloud. This article presents a comprehensive survey on fog computing. It critically reviews the state of the art in the light of a concise set of evaluation criteria. We cover both the architectures and the algorithms that make fog systems. Challenges and research directions are also introduced. In addition, the lessons learned are reviewed and the prospects are discussed in terms of the key role fog is likely to play in emerging technologies such as Tactile Internet.