The Conjunction of Fog Computing and the Industrial Internet of Things - An Applied Approach

Industrial applications benefit from cloud computing deployments in terms of scalability, manageability, and cost. However, cloud-only implementations do not meet the requirements of industrial applications such as latency, network traffic reduction, and reliability. Fog computing is a promising approach to overcome the limitations of cloud computing in terms of realtime and network utilization. Fog computing already found its application in various areas such as Augmented Reality and Smart Cities. This paper presents two case studies which show the applicability of the fog paradigm for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. IIoT applications are characterized by a high degree of integration and flexibility. The FEAt case study shows how the availability of a system can be increased by using a fog computing architecture and at the same time low latency for the analysis of sensor data can be achieved. In the second case study, FARADAY, we optimize bandwidth utilization in an existing industry environment by applying a fog-based solution. We show, that fog computing is applicable for industrial applications, helps to overcome problems associated with cloud deployments, and leads to reliable applications.