Special issue on fog networks

Fog computing as an extension of cloud computing is able to deploy data storage, computing and communication, control and management along the cloud to things continuum. From a systematic perspective, fog networks provide a distributed computing system with a hierarchical topology. Fog networks aim at meeting stringent latency requirements, reducing power consumption of end devices, providing real-time data processing and control with localized computing resources, and decreasing the burden of backhaul traffic to centralized data centers. However, in the era of fog computing and networks, we need to rethink about end-to-end network architecture, fog-enabled service management mechanisms, computing offloading and task allocation among fogcloud or fog-fog nodes, context-aware computing and communication tradeoff analysis, fogonomics and operational models, and scalability and security issues.