Foggy clouds and cloudy fogs: a real need for coordinated management of fog-to-cloud (F2C) computing systems

The recent advances in the cloud services technology are fueling a plethora of information technology innovation, including networking, storage and computing. Today, various flavors have evolved of Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and the so-called fog computing, – a concept referred to capabilities of edge-devices and user’s clients to compute, store and exchange data among each other and with the cloud. Though the evolution was not easily foreseeable to happen at such a rapid pace, each piece of it today facilitates and enables the deployment of what we commonly refer to as a smart scenario, including smart cities, smart transportation and smart homes. As most of the cloud, fog and network services today run simultaneously in each scenario, we observe that we are at the dawn of what maybe the next big step in the cloud computing and networking evolution, whereby services might be executed at the network edge, both in parallel and in a coordinated fashion, as well as supported by the unstoppable technology evolution. As edge devices become richer in functionality and smarter, – embedding capacities such as storage or processing, as well as embedding new functionalities, such as decision making, data collection and forwarding, sharing, etc, a real need is emerging for coordinated management of fog-to-cloud (F2C) computing systems. This paper introduces a layered fog-to-cloud (F2C) architecture, its benefits and strengths as well as the arising open and research challenges, making the case for the real need for their coordinated management. Our architecture, the illustrative use cases presented and a comparative performance analysis, albeit conceptual, all clearly show the way forward towards a new IoT scenario with a set of existing and unforeseen services provided on a highly distributed and dynamic compute, storage and networking resources, bringing together heterogeneous and commodity edge devices, emerging fogs as well as conventional clouds. KeywordsCloud computing, fog computing, fog-to-cloud, Internet of Things (IoT)