Fog computing is a distributed infrastructure in which certain application processes or services are managed at the edge of the network by a smart device. Fog systems are capable of processing large amounts of data locally, operate on-premise, are fully portable, and can be installed on heterogeneous hardware. These features make the fog platform highly suitable for time and location-sensitive applications. For example, internet of things (IoT) devices are required to quickly process a large amount of data. The significance of enterprise data and increased access rates from low-resource terminal devices demand reliable and low-cost authentication protocols. Lots of researchers have proposed authentication protocols with varied efficiencies. As a part of this chapter, the authors propose a secure authentication protocol that is strongly secure and best suited for the fog computing environment.
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Due to the significant physical distance between cloud service provider’s Data Centers (2016) and End User (EU), cloud computing suffers from substantial end-to-end delay, traffic congestion, processing of huge amount of data, and communication cost. Although few companies like Apple are moving towards more environmental friendly 100 percent renewable DCs with the wind, solar, and geothermal energy, the carbon emission from DCs due to the round-the-clock operation will dominate on global carbon footprint. Fog computing emerges as an alternative to traditional cloud computing to support geographically distributed, latency sensitive, and Quality-of-Service (QoS)-aware Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Fog computing was first initiated by Cisco to extend the cloud computing to the edge of a network as per Cisco (2015). Fog computing is a highly virtualized platform [4] that provides computing, storage, and networking services between EU and DC of the traditional cloud computing. According to Bonomi et al (2012), Fog computing has thefollowing
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Low latency and location awareness
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Supports geographic distribution
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End device mobility
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Capacity of processing high number of nodes
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Wireless access
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Real-time applications
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Heterogeneity
The OpenFog Consortium (2015), a consortium of high-tech giant companies and academic institutions across the world, aims to standardize and promote fog computing in various fields.
Many technology enablers for fog computing in various fields discussed by Chiang and Zhang (2016).Some of the examples are EU experience by GE, TOYOTA, BMW, etc., network equipment like switches, gateway by Cisco, Huawei, Ericsson, etc. The current research trends reflect the tremendous potential of fog computing towards sustainable development in global IoT market.
The term Fog Computing was introduced by Cisco Systems as a new model to bridge the gap between cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) devices (SABU, n.d.). It is a decentralized computing and it is a highly virtualized platform which provides computation, storage, and networking services between IoT devices and traditional cloud servers. Thus, the cloud-based services can be extended closer to the IoT devices (Yi, Li, & Li, 2015).
According to Bader et al (2016), fog computing extends a substantial amount of data storage, computing, communication, and networking of cloud computing near to the end devices. Due to close integration with the front-end intelligence enabled end devices, fog computing enhances the overall system efficiency, after that improving the performance of critical cyber-physical systems. An important key difference is that cloud computing tries to optimize resource in a global view, whereas fog computing organizes and manages the local virtual cluster.