All One Needs to Know about Fog Computing and Related Edge Computing Paradigms: A Complete Survey

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews fog computing and related edge paradigms, discussing their similarities, differences, research topics, challenges, and future directions in supporting IoT's growth.

Contribution

It provides a detailed taxonomy and categorization of research efforts on fog and edge computing paradigms, including a tutorial and future research challenges.

Findings

Provides a taxonomy of fog computing research topics

Categorizes efforts on fog, MEC, and cloudlet paradigms

Identifies key challenges and future directions in the field

Abstract

With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming part of our daily life and our environment, we expect rapid growth in the number of connected devices. IoT is expected to connect billions of devices and humans to bring promising advantages for us. With this growth, fog computing, along with its related edge computing paradigms, such as multi-access edge computing (MEC) and cloudlet, are seen as promising solutions for handling the large volume of security-critical and time-sensitive data that is being produced by the IoT. In this paper, we first provide a tutorial on fog computing and its related computing paradigms, including their similarities and differences. Next, we provide a taxonomy of research topics in fog computing, and through a comprehensive survey, we summarize and categorize the efforts on fog computing and its related computing paradigms. Finally, we provide challenges and future directions for research in fog computing.