The Internet of Things needs a new platform other than the cloud to work in the best way possible. Cloud computing, although very reliable for some purposes, cannot be trusted for critical tasks. For this purpose there is a need for a new infrastructure which would be able to handle all IoT transactions without any unnecessary risks.

There have been several problems related to the use of cloud computing in Internet of things. There is the latency issue, security and privacy risks, unreliability etc, which are reasons for concern as the number of connected devices increases. Real-time processing of data is also very difficult, which is a priority for IoT. Fog computing has emerged as a solution to this problem.

What is Fog computing?

Fog computing, also known as fog networking, is a kind of decentralized computing infrastructure in which computing resources and application services are distributed in a logical and efficient place at any point, along the continuum from the data source to the cloud. The most important goal of fog computing is to improve efficiency and reduce the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for processing, analysis and storage. Although this is mostly done for efficiency reasons, it can also be done for security and compliance reasons.

How fog computing works

In fog computing, much of the processing takes place in a data hub on a smart mobile device or on the edge of the network in a smart router or other gateway device. This technique is especially advantageous for Internet of Things as the amount of data generated by the sensors is immense. The amount of data is so huge that it is simply inefficient to transmit all the data a bunch of sensors produce to the cloud for processing and analysis. A great deal of bandwidth is needed and the back-and-forth communication between the sensors and the cloud can also negatively impact performance. The latency issue can be simply annoying in some cases such as gaming, but delays in data transmission might become life-threatening in case of vehicle-to-vehicle communication system or large scale distributed control system for rail travel.

Advantages of Fog computing over Cloud computing

Although cloud computing is still relevant when it comes to IoT applications, it is quickly becoming obsolete. It won’t be long when fog computing takes over and cloud is pushed to the side lines with fog computing handling all the critical work. The way the Internet of things is growing, it needs a special infrastructure base that can handle all its requirements, and at the present moment, fog computing seems to be the most viable option available.

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