With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the classic centralized cloud computing paradigm faces several challenges such as high latency, low capacity and network failure. To address these challenges, fog computing brings the cloud closer to IoT devices. The fog provides IoT data processing and storage locally at IoT devices instead of sending them to the cloud. In contrast to the cloud, the fog provides services with faster response and greater quality. Therefore, fog computing may be considered the best choice to enable the IoT to provide efficient and secure services for many IoT users. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of fog computing and its integration with the IoT by highlighting the benefits and implementation challenges. This review will also focus on the architecture of the fog and emerging IoT applications that will be improved by using the fog model. Finally, open issues and future research directions regarding fog computing and the IoT are discussed.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has extended the internet connectivity to reach not just computers and humans, but most of our environment things. The IoT has the potential to connect billions of objects simultaneously which has the impact of improving information sharing needs that result in improving our life. Although the IoT benefits are unlimited, there are many challenges facing adopting the IoT in the real world due to its centralized server/client model. For instance, scalability and security issues that arise due to the excessive numbers of IoT objects in the network. The server/client model requires all devices to be connected and authenticated through the server, which creates a single point of failure. Therefore, moving the IoT system into the decentralized path may be the right decision. One of the popular decentralization systems is blockchain. The Blockchain is a powerful technology that decentralizes computation and management processes which can solve many of IoT issues, especially security. This paper provides an overview of the integration of the blockchain with the IoT with highlighting the integration benefits and challenges. The future research directions of blockchain with IoT are also discussed. We conclude that the combination of blockchain and IoT can provide a powerful approach which can significantly pave the way for new business models and distributed applications.

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