Multimedia fog computing: minions in the cloud and crowd

In cloud computing, minions refer to virtual or physical machines that carry out the actual workload. Minions in the cloud hide in faraway data centers and thus cloud computing is less friendly to multimedia applications. The fog computing paradigm pushes minions toward edge networks. We adopt a generalized definition, where minions get into end devices owned by the crowd. The serious uncertainty, such as dynamic network conditions, limited battery levels, and unpredictable minion availability in multimedia fog platforms makes them harder to be managed than cloud platforms. In this chapter, we share our experience on utilizing resources from the crowd to optimize multimedia applications. The learned lessons shed some light on the optimal design of a unified multimedia fog platform for distributed multimedia applications.