Edge, Fog, and Cloud Computing : An Overview on Challenges and Applications

With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and a wide range of mobile devices, the conventional cloud computing paradigm faces significant challenges (high latency, bandwidth cost, etc.). Motivated by those constraints and concerns for the future of the IoT, modern architectures are gearing toward distributing the cloud computational resources to remote locations where most end-devices are located. Edge and fog computing are considered as the key enablers for applications where centralized cloud-based solutions are not suitable. In this paper, we review the high-level definition of edge, fog, cloud computing, and their configurations in various IoT scenarios. We further discuss their interactions and collaborations in many applications such as cloud offloading, smart cities, health care, and smart agriculture. Though there are still challenges in the development of such distributed systems, early research to tackle those limitations have also surfaced.