Coding for Distributed Fog Computing

Redundancy is abundant in Fog networks (i.e., many computing and storage points) and grows linearly with network size. We demonstrate the transformational role of coding in Fog computing for leveraging such redundancy to substantially reduce the bandwidth consumption and latency of computing. In particular, we discuss two recently proposed coding concepts, namely Minimum Bandwidth Codes and Minimum Latency Codes, and illustrate their impacts in Fog computing. We also review a unified coding framework that includes the above two coding techniques as special cases, and enables a tradeoff between computation latency and communication load to optimize system performance. At the end, we will discuss several open problems and future research directions.