Fog computing and its applications in 5G

With smartphones becoming our everyday companions, high-quality mobile applications have become an important integral of people’s lives. The intensive and ubiquitous use of mobile applications have led to explosive growth of mobile data traffics. To accommodate the surge mobile traffic yet providing the guaranteed service quality to mobile users represent a key issue of 5G mobile networks. This motivates the emergence of Fog computing as a promising, practical and efficient solution tailored to serving mobile traffics. Fog computing deploys highly virtualized computing and communication facilities at the proximity of mobile users. Dedicated to serving the mobile users, Fog computing explores the predictable service demand patterns of mobile users and typically provides desirable localized services accordingly. Stitching above features, Fog computing can provide mobile users with the demanded services through low-latency and short-distance local connections. In this chapter, we introduce the main features of Fog computing and describe its concept, architecture and design goals. Lastly, we discuss on the potential research issues from the perspective of 5G networking.