Pushing computation, control and storage into the “cloud” has been a key trend in networking in the past decade. The cloud is now “descending” to the network edge and often diffused among the client devices in both mobile and wireline networks. The cloud is becoming the “fog.” Empowered by the latest chips, radios, and sensors, each client device today is powerful in computation, in storage, in sensing and in communication. Yet client devices are still limited in battery power, global view of the network, and mobility support. Most interestingly, the collection of many clients in a crowd presents a highly distributed, under-organized, and possibly dense network.
Fog Networking is an architecture that will also support the Internet of Things, IoT, such as the “connected wearables.” Bold, new user interfaces are getting close to affordable price points for the mass, begging questions on the “architectural choices for the glasses and watches,” from naming to billing, and from session management to resource optimization. Fog Networking leverages past experience in sensor networks, P2P and MANET research, and incorporates the latest advances in devices, network systems, and data science to reshape the “balance of power” in the ecosystem of computing and networking.
