Fog computing in the IoT environment: Principles, features, and models

Internet of Things, abbreviated as IoT, is a distributed computing environment that is full of promise, helping to shape the future of the world. IoT is a network of smart devices capable of processing and storage. It integrates the existing and upcoming technologies to ensure enhanced provision of quality of life for human beings. IoT applications are immense, touching the varied fields of aviation, medicine, home automation, manufacturing, mining, marine zone, agricultural fields, forests, transportation, and citizens’ security, to name but a few. IoT has already helped tag the tigers from forests and cows from farming fields for identification and tracking. Smart wearable technologies have been embedded into the human body for health monitoring. Recently, IoT has become the backbone of a rising new distributed computing paradigm, called Fog Computing, also known as Edge Computing. Fog Computing is the latest distributed computing model that extends the Cloud Computing vision. The main advantage of the Fog paradigm is that it brings partial computation and storage right at the edge of the network, thus helping to reduce latency and the Internet bandwidth bottlenecks. With this background, this book chapter presents a detailed literature analysis using the Web of Science and Relecura software. This chapter also outlines fundamentals of Fog Computing such as its characteristics, models, theories, and different applications. Moreover, various upcoming technologies and frameworks have also been illustrated for better understanding of the Fog Computing phenomenon.