Yet another piece of jargon has entered the lexicon of communications with the concept of Fog. This is not an acronym but is the idea that for many applications and services emerging around the Internet of Things (IoT), data and network intelligence will be best hosted not in a distant cloud based data centre that may be thousands of kilometres away, but much closer to home, perhaps in a Telco Central Office or even on the customer premise.
This is because many of these applications involve interactive data sent in small pulses that may be highly sensitive to latency, or not otherwise suitable for transmitting over long distances since there may be many two way interactions. Many IoT services such as healthcare and energy monitoring will in any case be locally based, administered by a local hospital or utility perhaps. The fog, denoting a cloud on the ground close to home, describes this emerging phenomenon for hosting the remote or server portion of these IoT applications at the network edge, often extending to the home in devices like set top boxes and gateways. SoftAtHome has enhanced our SOP software platform to cater for emerging Fog architectures with developments such as our CloudAtHome.
Operators are now very much oriented towards the cloud and so for them Fog is a natural extension as they deploy more latency sensitive IoT services. Fog will extend the benefits of cloud into and across the home network right as far as the end devices, whether these are sensors or monitors for IoT applications, or tablets accessing premium TV services. One key cloud benefit derives from virtualization of the underlying infrastructure so that low cost and high performing commodity components can be used. Effectively the home network becomes part of the cloud, or the fog, with our software enabling independence of the hardware, so that operators can get away from the dependencies that have bogged them down for so long.
Data that is global in scope and large in scale, including premium video, will be hosted in the more distant cloud, enabling for example network PVR so that pay TV subscribers can access their content wherever they are in the world. But subscribers have no need to access say health diagnostic data themselves from remote locations since that data can only be generated on the spot where they are. Much the same applies to a lot of sensor data. In all those cases Fog will reduce latency and improve QoS, yielding a superior user experience. Fog will support IoT applications that need real time and predictable latency and will also be best placed to handle real time analytics around live big data.
There will of course be interaction between the Fog and the more distant Cloud, with real time analytics being a case in point. Analysis performed in real time may generate longer term data sets of wider value that may then be stored in the cloud and made available everywhere. Equally Fog will interact with the home network or in some cases overlap with it. Given that broadband and pay TV operators are the providers of end to end services from the cloud to the client devices in the home, they are best placed to optimize the handling of data at all levels. This includes the fog, cloud and home network. Our mission at SoftAtHome, as the “armed wing” of the operator, is assist with this data handling through solutions such as our CloudAtHome.
