Fog Computing: Introduction, Architecture, Analytics, and Platforms

Introduction

The ever-increasing Internet usage absolutely induces profound impact in several aspects over the society as well as the industry in last two decades. This evolution and revolution of Internet redefine the way people or industries interact, work and play with each other which open up new avenues for revenues. Consequently, every evolution in World Wide Web (WWW) changed the mode of business transactions and nature of the companies themselves. This technological progress on the Internet is not only just because of reduction in manufacturing cost of semiconductor components, but also the outstanding applicability of Internet Protocol (IP) and broader adoption of Internet. The rumblings and mumblings of web begin with the interconnection of faraway computers using ARPANET followed by the introduction of TCP/IP and WWW. As a consequence, the read-only web is evolved which allows the users only to read the information from the static web pages (refer to Figure 1). This evolution of the web is called the web of content (Web 1.0) which is primarily meant for reading the content and lacks in active communication or participation from the user side. However, Web 2.0 (web of communication or read-write web) allows any user to contribute their content to the web and communicates with any other web users. Some of the notable Web 2.0 developments are blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. Conversely, Web 2.0 failed to associate the context with the data, and hence the actual requirements of the humans are not appropriately communicated to the software applications. For instance, during any search operation on the Internet, if the context of a keyword entered by the human is not understood by the search application (software) then the search operation may end up with limited results since the application does not have the intelligence to distinguish the relevant and irrelevant data for that context. This communication gap leads to the birth of Web 3.0 (web of context or read-write-execute web) where the context of the data is provided using semantic mark-up whereas, the inter-application communication support is provided using web services. In the meantime, the technological advancements in electronics extremely reduce the cost of mobile devices and the subsequent adoption of wireless Internet using mobile networks associate numerous people and businesses to the Internet. This situation sets the goal for the new web version, Web 4.0 (web of things or mobile web) with an objective to interconnect all the mobile devices in the real and virtual world. For instance, the smart agent in Web 4.0 may automatically recognize you using its camera and say to you: “Good Morning, Bob! You are going to NY today. Don’t forget to take the raincoat; it is raining there. Also, I came to know the tickets for your favorite ‘Wicked’ musical show is available. If you say ‘yes,' I will book the tickets for the show,” and if you replied with ‘yes,' it might say, “I have booked the ticket with the row ‘M’ and seat no. 108 which is your favorite most of the times.”

Figure 1.

Evolution of World Wide Web

Remember! Web 4.0, not a new technology rather it integrates the mobile devices into the web. Even though the Web 4.0 is not yet matured and still continuously developing, vision for Web 5.0 is proposed. Web 5.0 (web of thoughts or symbiotic web or emotive web) perceives the feelings and emotions of users during the communication between the humans and computers. For example, using the brain wave sensors implanted in the headphone, the users can relate their emotions with the content thereby enabling personalization which is an affable feature of Web 5.0. This chapter mainly deals with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Machine to Machine (M2M) communications, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT) and fog computing which are the ingredients of Web 4.0.