Comparison of edge computing implementations: Fog computing, cloudlet and mobile edge computing

Abstract

When it comes to storage and computation of large scales of data, Cloud Computing has acted as the de-facto solution over the past decade. However, with the massive growth in intelligent and mobile devices coupled with technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), V2X Communications, Augmented Reality (AR), the focus has shifted towards gaining real-time responses along with support for context-awareness and mobility. Due to the delays induced on the Wide Area Network (WAN) and location agnostic provisioning of resources on the cloud, there is a need to bring the features of the cloud closer to the consumer devices. This led to the birth of the Edge Computing paradigm which aims to provide context aware storage and distributed Computing at the edge of the networks. In this paper, we discuss the three different implementations of Edge Computing namely Fog Computing, Cloudlet and Mobile Edge Computing in detail and compare their features. We define a set of parameters based on which one of these implementations can be chosen optimally given a particular use-case or application and present a decision tree for the selection of the optimal implementation.