❱❱ The IT system configuration (top) reflects the structure of the IIoT (bottom), condensing billions of edge devices down into a few highly connected data centres
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n the 20th century, transport, medical, power and industrial systems were built from individual devices, usually programmed one at a time. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is changing all of that, transforming isolated programmable devices into intelligent networks of
connected machines, such as autonomous cars, intelligent drone delivery systems, smart grid power systems, automated air traffic control, connected medical devices, robotic oil drilling and more. As a result, these systems have unique computing requirements including real-time processing, complex data interconnectivity, integrated security, high performance, reliability and scalability. Although the Internet of Things (IoT) is currently driven by
connecting field devices to the cloud, there are limitations. Most IoT implementations are about connecting to — and doing all of the processing in — the cloud. Although this can work for the consumer IoT, not everything can take place in the cloud when it comes to the IIoT. Cloud computing, with its options for renting storage
infrastructure and computing services as well as business processes and overall applications, is still relatively new. This new technique simplifies the clients’ computing jobs by renting resources and services. Cloud systems are located within the Internet, a large
heterogeneous network with numerous speeds, technologies, topologies and types, but with no central control. Because of the non-homogeneous and loosely controlled nature of the Internet, there are many unresolved issues, especially relating to quality of service. One such issue that affects the quality of service severely is network latency: real time applications with which users directly interact are badly affected by delay and delay jitter caused by latency in networks. The other major issue confronted with cloud computing is
security and privacy. Since the cloud systems have been located within the Internet, user requests, data transmission and system responses need to traverse many intermediate networks depending on the distance between the users and systems. When customer data is in a public cloud, there is a risk of their integrity and confidentiality being compromised. The deeper the data inside the Internet, the higher the risk as the data must travel a long distance to and from the user’s computer to the cloud system, even if the data is encrypted. Similarly, the availability of cloud systems can also be attacked using various methods. Thus, cloud systems at present face various security threats due to the very nature of their implementation within the Internet coupled with location independence.
FOG COMPUTING When a cloud descends to ground level it becomes a fog. And in essence, that is what happens when the computer cloud descends to the vicinity of the devices themselves: it becomes fog computing. Fog networking supports the IoT concept, in which most of the
devices used on a daily basis will be connected to each other. Examples include mobile phones, wearable health monitoring devices, connected vehicles and devices using augmented reality, such as the Google Glass.
ORIGINS Fog computing refers to extending cloud computing to the edge of the network of the enterprise. Also known as edge computing (or fogging), the term was created by networking Internet specialist Cisco. Fog computing facilitates the operation of computing, storage and networking services between end devices
and cloud computing data centres. By handling these services that make up the IoT at the network edge, data can in many cases be processed more efficiently than if it needed to be sent to the cloud for processing. In 2012, the need to extend cloud computing with fog
computing emerged to cope with huge growing numbers of IoT devices and big data volumes for real-time low-latency applications. In January 2014, Cisco introduced its fog computing vision as a way of bringing cloud computing capabilities to the edge of a network, closer to the rapidly growing number of connected devices and applications that consume cloud services and generate increasingly massive amounts of data. While Cisco may have coined the term fog computing, it has
competition in the nascent edge computing market from companies like EMC, VMware, Intel and IBM, all of which are rolling out — or are in the process of rolling out — products that deliver edge computing capabilities. The wonderfully named OpenFog Consortium is an association of major tech companies aimed at standardising and promoting fog computing. Both cloud computing and fog computing provide storage,
applications and data to end-users. However, fog computing has a bigger proximity to end-users and bigger geographical distribution. Fog computing gives the cloud a companion to handle the two exabytes of data generated daily from the IoT. Processing data closer to where it is produced and needed solves the challenges of exploding data volume, variety and velocity. Fog computing accelerates awareness and response to events
by eliminating a round trip to the cloud for analysis. It avoids the need for costly bandwidth additions by offloading gigabytes of network traffic from the core network. It also protects sensitive IoT data by analysing it inside company walls. Ultimately, organisations that adopt fog computing gain deeper and faster
June 2018 /// Environmental Engineering /// 11
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