With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, the cloud model is unable to offer satisfactory services for latency-sensitive and real-time applications due to high latency and scalability issues. Hence, an emerging computing paradigm named as fog/edge computing was evolved, to offer services close to the data source and optimize the quality of services (QoS) parameters such as latency, scalability, reliability, energy, privacy, and security of data. This article presents the evolution in the computing paradigm from the client-server model to edge computing along with their objectives and limitations. A state-of-the-art review of Cloud Computing and Cloud of Things (CoT) is presented that addressed the techniques, constraints, limitations, and research challenges. Further, we have discussed the role and mechanism of fog/edge computing and Fog of Things (FoT), along with necessitating amalgamation with CoT. We reviewed the several architecture, features, applications, and existing research challenges of fog/edge computing. The comprehensive survey of these computing paradigms offers the depth knowledge about the various aspects, trends, motivation, vision, and integrated architectures. In the end, experimental tools and future research directions are discussed with the hope that this study will work as a stepping-stone in the field of emerging computing paradigms.
K E Y W O R D Scloud computing, internet of things, cloud of things, fog computing, latency
INTRODUCTIONDifferent computing paradigms have evolved over the decades as per the needs in various situations. The concept of the Cloud computing paradigm has evolved from distributed systems and it has gained attention by offering a plethora of services to end-users anywhere and anytime on pay per use basis. It has also become the business model in the last decade due to well-known characteristics like scalability, multi-tenant environment, virtualization, and resource pooling. It is observed that a large number of industries, government, as well as private organization, have shifted their applications and data to the cloud platform. Further, the Cloud is also playing a significant role in the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. As per the transformation and movement in ubiquitous computing, we need the integration