Architecture of Fog-Enabled and Cloud-Enhanced Internet of Things Applications

Related Work

The authors in (Mouradian, 2017) have recently reviewed over 160 Fog Computing sources and have provided at a high level, a comprehensive Survey on Fog Computing. In this paper, we look to the authors’ comparison and contrast of the similar paradigms such as Cloudlet, Fog Computing and Multi-Access Edge Computing to inform our architectural discussion (Figure 1):

Figure 1.

Comparison and contrast of fog, cloudlet and MEC (Mouradian, 2017)

In (Yannuzzi, 2014), the authors explain that in the years to come, IoT applications will demand significant storage and compute resources, but where those resources should be placed is still an open question. The Cloud seems like a natural choice, but the authors state that this is unfeasible in numerous scenarios, “especially when the goal is to build a general and multipurpose platform that can serve a wide variety of IoT applications.” The authors conclude that Fog Computing is a natural fit for this role for a variety of reasons. In section 3, we look to this paper for Fog’s benefits and a high-level reference architecture for Cloud-enhanced, and Fog-enabled IoT applications.