Fog Computing for Smart Living

The World Health Organization projects that the number of people living in cities will nearly double over the next few decades, so urban centers need to provide more sustainable solutions for smart living. New technologies— such as materials, sensors, wireless communications, and controls—will be necessary to manage living environments that proactively sense behavioral and health risks and provide situationaware responses t o emergencies or disasters. In addition, utility and transportation networks must adapt to dynamic usage, tra c conditions, and user behavior with a minimal carbon footprint; a clean and renewable energy grid must actuate localized energy and power control; and pervasive security is needed to detect and prevent potential threats. This vision is bold but critical to enabling smart living. Cloud-only models face serious challenges in latency, network bandwidth, geographic focus, reliability, and security. Fog computing reduces these challenges by providing a systemlevel horizontal architecture to distribute computing, storage, control, and networking resources and services from the cloud to connected devices (“things”). Think of fog computing as the cloud on the ground: it enables latency-sensitive computing to be performed in close proximity to the things it controls. Over time, fog and cloud computing will converge into uni ed end-to-end platforms o ering integrated services and applications along the continuum from the cloud to things. Applications developed and deployed for the cloud will be able to run in fog and vice versa.