Fog for 5G and IoT

Introduction

BHARATH BALASUBRAMANIAN,¹ MUNG CHIANG,² and FLAVIO BONOMI³

¹ ATT Labs Research, Bedminster, NJ, USA

² EDGE Labs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

³ Nebbiolo Technologies, Inc., Milpitas, CA, USA

The past 15 years have seen the rise of the cloud, along with rapid increase in Internet backbone traffic and more sophisticated cellular core networks. There are three different types of clouds: (i) data centers, (ii) backbone IP networks, and (iii) cellular core networks, responsible for computation, storage, communication, and network management. Now the functions of these three types of clouds are descending to be among or near the end users, as the “fog.” Empowered by the latest chips, radios, and sensors, the edge devices today are capable of performing complex functions including computation, storage, sensing, and network management. In this book, we explore the evolving notion of the fog architecture that incorporates networking, computing, and storage.

Architecture is about the division of labor in modularization: who does what, at what timescale, and how to glue them back together. The division of labor between layers, between control plane and data plane, and between cloud and fog [1] in turn supports various application domains. We take the following as a working definition of the fog architecture: it is an architecture for the cloud‐to‐things (C2T) continuum that uses one or a collaborative multitude of end‐user clients or near‐user edge devices ...