Assessment of the Suitability of Fog Computing in the Context of Internet of Things

This work performs a rigorous, comparative analysis of the fog computing paradigm and the conventional cloud computing paradigm in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), by mathematically formulating the parameters and characteristics of fog computing-one of the first attempts of its kind. With the rapid increase in the number of Internet-connected devices, the increased demand of real-time, low-latency services is proving to be challenging for the traditional cloud computing framework. Also, our irreplaceable dependency on cloud computing demands the cloud data centers (DCs) always to be up and running which exhausts huge amount of power and yield tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas. In this work, we assess the applicability of the newly proposed fog computing paradigm to serve the demands of the latency-sensitive applications in the context of IoT. We model the fog computing paradigm by mathematically characterizing the fog computing network in terms of power consumption, service latency, CO2 emission, and cost, and evaluating its performance for an environment with high number of Internet-connected devices demanding real-time service. A case study is performed with traffic generated from the 100 highest populated cities being served by eight geographically distributed DCs. Results show that as the number of applications demanding real-time service increases, the fog computing paradigm outperforms traditional cloud computing. For an environment with 50 percent applications requesting for instantaneous, real-time services, the overall service latency for fog computing is noted to decrease by 50.09 percent. However, it is mentionworthy that for an environment with less percentage of applications demanding for low-latency services, fog computing is observed to be an overhead compared to the traditional cloud computing. Therefore, the work shows that in the context of IoT, with high number of latency-sensitive applications fog computing outperforms cloud computing.