A Framework of Fog Computing: Architecture, Challenges, and Optimization

Fog computing (FC) is an emerging distributed computing platform aimed at bringing computation close to its data sources, which can reduce the latency and cost of delivering data to a remote cloud. This feature and related advantages are desirable for many Internet-of-Things applications, especially latency sensitive and mission intensive services. With comparisons to other computing technologies, the definition and architecture of FC are presented in this paper. The framework of resource allocation for latency reduction combined with reliability, fault tolerance, privacy, and underlying optimization problems are also discussed. We then investigate an application scenario and conduct resource optimization by formulating the optimization problem and solving it via a genetic algorithm. The resulting analysis generates some important insights on the scalability of the FC systems.