Why is fog computing beneficial for IoT?

The Internet of Things represents a remarkable transformation of the way in which our world is soon expected to interact. Much like the World Wide Web connected computers to networks, and the next evolution connected people to the Internet and other people, the IoT is poised to interconnect devices, people, environments, virtual objects and machines.

In short, we can say that IoT is the convergence of connecting people, things, data and processes, which is transforming our life, business and everything in between, and it is necessary that it gets analyzed in real-time.

Fog Computing

Fog computing, also known as edge computing or fog networking, operates on network ends instead of hosting and working from a centralized cloud. This means that the data can be processed locally in smart devices instead of having to be sent to the cloud for processing. Fog computing basically grew out of the need to address some growing concerns.

A huge concern is the ability to act in real time to incoming transactions and working within set limits of bandwidth. Sensors today are generating too much data to be sent to the cloud. The bandwidth is not enough and costs too much. Fog computing places some of transactions and resources at the edge of the cloud, instead of establishing channels for cloud storage and utilization, it reduces the need for bandwidth by not sending every bit of information over cloud channels, and instead aggregating it at certain access points. Use of this kind of distributed strategy can lower costs and improve efficiencies.

Fog computing extends the cloud computing paradigm at the edge of the network to address application and services that do not fit the paradigm of the cloud, including:

• Applications that require very low and predictable latency
• Geographically distributed applications
• Fast mobile applications
• Large-scale distributed control systems

Fog, cloud and IoT

The promise made by IoT is to bring advantages of cloud computing to an earthly level, which means extending it into every home, vehicle, and workplace with the help of smart, Internet-connected devices. However, it is necessary that as our dependence on these newly connected devices increases along with the benefits and uses of a maturing technology, the reliability of gateways that make the IoT a functional reality must increase and make up time a near guarantee.

Use of robust edge gateways would strengthen the entire IoT infrastructure by absorbing the brunt of processing work before passing it to the cloud. Fog computing can meet the requirements of reliable low latency responses, as it processes at the edge and can better deal with high traffic volume by using smart filtering and selective transmission.

This evolutionary shift from cloud to fog makes a lot of sense. We are now blanketed in reliable 4G technologies, and mobile devices rival many PCs in terms of computational power. Thus it does make sense to move from a hub-and-spoke model to one that resembles a mesh or edge computing data architecture.