A Fog Computing Framework For Big Stream Real-time IoT Applications

Cloud computing provides unlimited on-demand computing, storage and networking power for industry to leverage. However, as its scale and scope continues to expand, its limitations like high latency, accessibility, security and compliance shortcomings prevent its greater use and applicability particularly in scenarios where real-time communication and the quality of rapid computing delivered is a necessity. Fog computing hopes to bridge this gap by introducing an intermediary computing layer between smart IoT devices and the cloud. Currently, these ideas exist in specialised areas with current implementations being proprietary, vendor-locked and requiring dramatic and non-transferable changes to hardware and software to meet vendor requirements. Moreover, fog computing is still quite a recent area which makes the state of the art incipient regarding architecture definitions, middleware and real-world implementations. This research proposes a fog computing architecture that is built off the alignment of the reference architectures from a leading industry consortium, OpenFog, and a leading standards setting organization, ETSI. The proposed architecture has the following attributes: modular, plug-in design, generic, open, standards compliant, vendor agnostic and runs on high volume standard hardware whilst preserving the benefits offered by public clouds.