Navigating Fog Federation: Classifying Current Research and Identifying Challenges

TL;DR

This paper surveys fog federation research, classifying existing approaches, architectures, and challenges, and highlights open issues and future research directions in enabling scalable, resource-sharing fog environments.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive classification and analysis of fog federation research, identifying key challenges and future directions.

Findings

Various architectures and approaches for fog federation are analyzed.

Key challenges include resource management, scalability, and interoperability.

The survey highlights open research gaps and future directions.

Abstract

Fog computing has gained significant attention for its potential to enhance resource management and service delivery by bringing computation closer to the network edge.While numerous surveys have explored various aspects of fog computing, there is a distinct gap in the literature when it comes to fog federation, a crucial extension that enables collaboration and resource sharing across multiple fog environments, enhancing scalability, service availability, and resource optimization.This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the existing work on fog federation, classifying the contributions from its inception to the present.We analyze the various approaches, architectures, and methodologies proposed for fog federation and identify the primary challenges addressed in this field.In addition, we explore the simulation tools and platforms utilized in evaluating fog federation systems.Our survey uniquely contributes to the literature by addressing the specific topic of fog federation, offering insights into the current state of the art and highlighting open research gaps and future directions.