Fog and Edge Computing

6 Middleware for Fog and Edge Computing: Design Issues

Madhurima Pore Vinaya Chakati Ayan Banerjee and Sandeep K. S. Gupta

6.1 Introduction

Edge computing and fog computing have combined in a way to facilitate a wide variety of applications that involve human interactions, which are geographically distributed and have stringent real‐time performance requirements. The Internet of Things (IoT) or Internet of Everything (IoT) has introduced edge devices that now obtain information from user environment and need to respond intelligently to changes in real time. The scale of an application has increased from mere single mobile device to a large number of edge devices that are geographically distributed and change locations dynamically. Even though cloud support can be used in processing the data generated by the edge devices, the delay incurred in communication to cloud devices is excessively more than the real‐time constraints of some of the latency sensitive applications. With such a large scale of data being generated in geographically distributed locations, sending the code toward the data is in some cases more efficient than processing in the cloud. Fog computing introduced computation solution in the form of fog devices, cloudlets, and mobile edge computing (MEC), which provide computation services in the network edge. It can also meet the real‐time requirements of such applications.

Apart from the components that pertain to application logic, there are large design ...