Integrated Fog and Cloud Computing Issues and Challenges

1. Introduction

Cloud Computing has become the need of the hour for today’s technology enabled environment and it can be seen as one of the innovative ways for providing easy accessibility, to a shared pool of configurable network resources (e.g.-networking, Computing, data storage, application and other services) by accessing network that can be rapidly managed and released with minimum management effort.

Cloud Computing is very flexible and beneficial model of Computing which works based on pay-as-you-go model. Users can access Cloud resources in time and location independent way using different types of resources in Internet-of-things (IoT). The IoT can be defined as huge collection of inter-correlated devices that are connected to Cloud Computing with the help of internet. The IoT devices like mobile, CCTV, smart watch, smart TVs are demanding services over the internet in an internet friendly environment. As it is estimated by Cisco, “There will be around 50 billion connected devices by 2020”(D. Evans, 2011) and it is also estimated by IDC that “the amount of data analyzed on devices that are physically close to the Internet of Things is approaching 40 percent” (A. Dasgupta, 2017), the quality of services offered by Cloud Computing is deteriorating rapidly. Further, with a new advent in technology like 5G network and artificial intelligence (AI), new challenges are emerging for management of Cloud resources like platform, infrastructure, storage, bandwidth and so on.

The rapid development of smart cities also needs services form Cloud service providers and internet of things for providing efficient transport management, logistic, health, disaster management and other services. Hence, the Cloud Computing intermixed with concepts of internet of things is becoming the requirement of every industry, organization and individuals. With the increasing number of web-based and smart devices, Cloud Computing allows users to access resources and services using IoT devices.

The biggest issue in accessing the services of Cloud Computing is that all processing is done on Cloud resources. For processing on Cloud resources, it is required to send all data to Cloud that leads to many issues and challenges. The important issues are large volume of data, low latency rate, low bandwidth of the network. These issues lead to performance degradation in the services offered by Cloud Computing and these services also experience service break fall, data security and network congestion.

To improve the services offered by Cloud Computing, Fog Computing provides assistance to IoT devices for efficiently accessing the various services of Cloud Computing with an increased performance. Figure 1 depicts the relationship between Cloud Computing, Fog Computing and Internet-of-things devices. The Fog Computing behaves as an intermediate medium between the Cloud resources and IOT devices to tackle with the huge volume of data analysis and for efficient performance in terms of speed, bandwidth and security. In Fog-enabled environment, the Fog node minimizes the interactions of IoT devices with Cloud resources and keeps the data processing closer to source devices leading to better performance. There are many reasons to process and analyze data generated by IoT-devices close to IoT devices. It offloads huge network traffic from the core network and keeps the data secured within the network which will eventually decreases the latency time and offered more refined services for real time IoT applications. The new Computing paradigm can be used for reducing the costs of transmitting large amount of data by providing processing and analyzing data at the edge of the network. It can play a key role in handling large amount of Computing, storage, networking and other services in an efficient way. The researchers are continuously exploring this Computing paradigm within IoT infrastructure for many other domains including agriculture, health, research, academia, business, logistic processes, disaster management to name a few.

The main contribution of paper is as follows-

• 1.

  The main focus of this manuscript is to discuss various aspects of Cloud Computing in collaboration with the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) in real time interaction.

• 2.

  It also discusses various quality of service (QoS) issues and challenges in integrated cloud and Fog Computing environment.

• 3.

  It also sheds light on the key differences between Cloud Computing and Fog Computing; and also explain different applications of fog-enabled Cloud Computing.