Fog computing: Concepts, principles and related paradigms

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. Fog Computing, sometimes also referred to as Edge Computing, extends the Cloud Computing paradigm to lower latency, improve location awareness, provide better support for mobility and increase business agility. There is necessarily a requirement for these attributes in this age of the Internet of Things (IoT) where, according to one estimate, there will be close to 50 billion interconnected smart devices by 2020, and the amount of Big Data generated by these devices is expected to grow to around 200 exabytes per year by 2020. The core characteristic of the Fog Computing architecture is that it provides compute and data analytics services more immediately and close to the physical devices that generate such data, i.e. at the Edge of the network, and thus bypassing the wider Internet. In this chapter, we discuss the concepts and principles of Fog paradigm as well as the related paradigms and technologies, present the difference between the Cloud and Fog architectures and briefly discuss the OpenFog Reference Architecture. Hopefully, this chapter will set a scene for the various Fog-related topics presented in the rest of this book.