5G and the Fog — Survey of related technologies and research directions

The rapid and quick growth of smart mobile devices has caused users to demand pervasive mobile broadband services comparable to the fixed broadband Internet. In this direction, the research initiatives on 5G networks have gained accelerating momentum globally. 5G Networks will act as a nervous system of the digital society, economy, and everyday peoples life and will enable new future Internet of Services paradigms such as Anything as a Service, where devices, terminals, machines, also smart things and robots will become innovative tools that will produce and will use applications, services and data. However, future Internet will exacerbate the need for improved QoS/QoE, supported by services that are orchestrated on-demand and that are capable of adapt at runtime, depending on the contextual conditions, to allow reduced latency, high mobility, high scalability, and real time execution. A new paradigm called Fog Computing, or briefly Fog has emerged to meet these requirements. Fog Computing extends Cloud Computing to the edge of the network, reduces service latency, and improves QoS/QoE, resulting in superior user-experience. This paper provides a survey of 5G and Fog Computing technologies and their research directions, that will lead to Beyond-5G Network in the Fog.