Fog and Edge Computing

Preface

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm promises to make “things” such as physical objects with sensing capabilities and/or attached with tags, mobile objects such as smart phones and vehicles, consumer electronic devices, and home appliances such as refrigerators, televisions, and healthcare devices as part of the Internet environment. In cloud‐centric IoT (CIoT) applications, the sensor data from these “things” is extracted, accumulated, and processed at the public/private clouds, leading to significant latencies. Fog computing addresses this issue in developing real‐time IoT applications, by mainly utilizing proximity‐based computational resources across the IoT layers such as gateways, cloudlets, and network switches/routers. A similar approach of utilizing proximity resources in the telecommunication domain is mobile edge computing.

To realize the full potential of fog and edge computing and similar paradigms, researchers and practitioners need to address several challenges and develop suitable conceptual and technological solutions for tackling them. These include development of scalable architectures, moving from closed systems to open systems, dealing with privacy and ethical issues involved in data sensing, storage, processing, and actions, designing interaction protocols, and autonomic management.

The primary purpose of this book is to capture the state‐of‐the‐art in fog and edge computing, their applications, architectures, and technologies. The book ...