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Concept
Fog computing
Summary
Fog computing or fog networking, also known as fogging, is an architecture that uses edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of computation (edge computing), storage, and communication locally and routed over the Internet backbone.
In 2011, the need to extend cloud computing with fog computing emerged, in order to cope with huge number of IoT devices and big data volumes for real-time low-latency applications. Fog computing, also called edge computing, is intended for distributed computing where numerous "peripheral" devices connect to a cloud. The word "fog" refers to its cloud-like properties, but closer to the "ground", i.e. IoT devices. Many of these devices will generate voluminous raw data (e.g., from sensors), and rather than forward all this data to cloud-based servers to be processed, the idea behind fog computing is to do as much processing as possible using computing units co-located with the data-generating devices, so that processed rather than raw data is forwarded, and bandwidth requirements are reduced. An additional benefit is that the processed data is most likely to be needed by the same devices that generated the data, so that by processing locally rather than remotely, the latency between input and response is minimized. This idea is not entirely new: in non-cloud-computing scenarios, special-purpose hardware (e.g., signal-processing chips performing Fast Fourier Transforms) has long been used to reduce latency and reduce the burden on a CPU.
Fog networking consists of a control plane and a data plane. For example, on the data plane, fog computing enables computing services to reside at the edge of the network as opposed to servers in a data-center. Compared to cloud computing, fog computing emphasizes proximity to end-users and client objectives (e.g. operational costs, security policies, resource exploitation), dense geographical distribution and context-awareness (for what concerns computational and IoT resources), latency reduction and backbone bandwidth savings to achieve better quality of service (QoS) and edge analytics/stream mining, resulting in superior user-experience and redundancy in case of failure while it is also able to be used in Assisted Living scenarios.
Official source
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