Application Management in Fog Computing Environments: A Taxonomy, Review and Future Directions

TL;DR

This paper reviews application management strategies in Fog computing, proposing a taxonomy, identifying research gaps, and suggesting future directions to enhance real-time IoT application support at the network edge.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive taxonomy for Fog application management and highlights key research gaps and future directions in the field.

Findings

Existing strategies vary in architecture, placement, and maintenance approaches.

Identified significant research gaps in resource management and scalability.

Proposed a perspective model for improved application management in Fog environments.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is being rapidly adopted for the creation of smart environments in various domains. The IoT-enabled Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) associated with smart city, healthcare, Industry 4.0 and Agtech handle a huge volume of data and require data processing services from different types of applications in real-time. The Cloud-centric execution of IoT applications barely meets such requirements as the Cloud datacentres reside at a multi-hop distance from the IoT devices. \textit{Fog computing}, an extension of Cloud at the edge network, can execute these applications closer to data sources. Thus, Fog computing can improve application service delivery time and resist network congestion. However, the Fog nodes are highly distributed, heterogeneous and most of them are constrained in resources and spatial sharing. Therefore, efficient management of applications is necessary to fully exploit the capabilities of Fog nodes. In this work, we investigate the existing application management strategies in Fog computing and review them in terms of architecture, placement and maintenance. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy and highlight the research gaps in Fog-based application management. We also discuss a perspective model and provide future research directions for further improvement of application management in Fog computing.