Computing Reviews
Today's Issue Hot Topics Search Browse Recommended My Account Log In
Review Help
Search
Fog computing : concepts, frameworks and technologies
Mahmood Z., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2018. 291 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319948-89-8)
Date Reviewed: Mar 6 2019

In a nutshell, fog computing tries to transfer familiar concepts from cloud computing, like virtualization, elastic scalability, and everything-as-a-service (XaaS), closer to the sensors and devices of the Internet of Things (IoT) or to end users, to the so-called “edge,” to reduce response times and latency, to decrease network bandwidth, and to increase computing power for better algorithms.

If you spend a second imagining that in practice, thinking of the myriad of different potential “things” out there in the IoT, the different networking and computing technologies used (from mobile devices to any kind of gateway), the diverse set of organizations possibly participating with concomitant governance issues, and all the potential security- and privacy-related concerns, you immediately recognize that this is by no means an easy undertaking. Compiling an “authoritative reference” and presenting an “enlightening volume“ of the state of the art would likewise require exceptional care and special skills. Sadly, this book is an egregious failure in all respects.

Fog computing is a spectacular example of how careless writing, superficial content, lack of conceptual clarity, and absence of structure and alignment between chapters, coupled with unbelievably low-quality (often utterly unreadable) diagrams and poor (at times unintelligible) English, can render a whole book unreadable and unattractive to potential audiences. Unfortunately, this assessment includes every one of the 13 chapters even though they are written by different authors.

Of course, it is not the case that every single sentence or proposition is false per se, but the level of imprecision, the number of gross misrepresentations, and also the amount of blatant errors is just sufficiently high and dense that you need to be an expert yourself to discriminate usable or correct parts from the rest.

Let me give just a few examples.

One of the conceptually toughest tasks is to provide sound and consistent definitions of the plethora of notoriously ill-defined and overlapping terms in this realm, like cloudlets, mist computing, fog node, edge node, edge computing, edge gateway, mobile edge, cloud computing, and so on. You simply will not find this done anywhere in a rigorous way. Furthermore, chapters typically use their own definitions that are inconsistent with the other chapters.

Chapter 2 features a (completely superfluous) literature search for “fog computing” and “edge computing” of 746 articles. IEEE Explore gives me 1415 entries for the same period of time. The description of the “tree architecture” of a European Union (EU) research project is simply wrong, mixing the “roots” of the tree with its “leaves.”

Web 2.0, Extensible Markup Language (XML)(!), web services, SP.NET, and ADO.NET(!) are highlighted as state-of-the-art technologies, with no mention of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), the emerging application programming interface (API) economy, or references to modern frameworks at all.

Chapter 4 should feature technology adoption in a developing world context; however, the only reference to developing countries is limited to a single sentence stating the very obvious, namely that information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure is the main challenge (no reference given here either).

Believe it or not, ten pages of chapter 5 (almost 50 percent) are filled with actual examples of trivial measurements (like temperature readings). For whatever purpose, the authors do not spare the reader and also give the comma-separated values (CSV) representation of the very same measurements. Somehow, however, they forgot to include “fog” in their fairly trivial cloud-based scenario.

Of the 24 pages of chapter 6 on “performance enhancements of fog computing using SDN” (software-defined networking--the acronym is not even defined in the chapter), only a single page actually covers the topic. The rest is a futile description of a miscellany of fog, edge, and cloud computing related terms. Besides that, the term SDN is simply wrongly explained (there simply is no “forwarding plane” in SDN); Wikipedia is more exact.

“Quality of Experience” (as opposed to quality of service) is highlighted in chapter 7, but the authors apparently cannot even manage to simply copy the International Telecommunication Union’s corresponding definitions.

Service orientation, APIs, and microservices currently do play an important role, so architects, requirements engineers, and application designers alike would appreciate chapter 8 on service development in a fog environment. Essentially, though, everything collapses down to identifying and deploying some (trivial) integration and forwarding functionality onto an on-premise gateway rechristened “fog node” (purely for the sake of the name).

The attempt of chapter 9--featuring “data utility”--to be more rigorous, here with a unified modeling language (UML) class diagram and even some (pseudo) mathematical formulas, backfires. First, the authors openly misidentify and conflate “data source” with “data” and “data interface.” Second, the (pseudo) formula for calculating “data utility” is utterly wrong with regard to the definition given in the text, as it misses the functional and nonfunctional requirements essentially defining (according to the authors) “data utility.”

Skipping the superfluous eight pages on cyber intelligence jargon and definitions, the use case of chapter 10 should make use of fog, edge, mobile edge, and cloud computing all at the same time. However, even an architectural metamodel and a table showing the differences between mobile edge and fog computing do not save the authors from drawing a final architecture diagram obfuscating and even contradicting the most important concepts.

Chapter 11 simply does not contain any fog- or edge-related content. It is merely an unintegrated collection--“framework”-- of known (loosely service-oriented) software engineering methods and practices.

We find the very same “data utility” concept revisited in chapter 12, where the authors introduce a “platform” permitting the arbitrary allocation of the execution of some services during design and runtime. The description, however, remains at a very superficial (not to say trivial), completely theoretical, and uninteresting level.

Finally, chapter 13 touches on the special aspects of vehicular networks where you actually need a kind of “dynamic” fog because of the moving “edge devices.” Title and abstract suggest using caching for ensuring very low response times for safety-critical applications (no surprise here). The purely theoretical analysis mentions caching in less than two percent of the whole text (that is, 16 lines of text). The rest is a lengthy outline of the domain.

To obtain a sound introduction, I advise the reader to directly go to sources like the OpenFog Consortium (https://www.openfogconsortium.org/) or to download NIST Special Publication 500-325 [1]. State-of-the-art and current research is nicely covered in the IEEE Internet Computing issue on fog computing [2]. You definitely will not want to spend time or money on this book.

Reviewer:  Christoph F. Strnadl Review #: CR146460 (1905-0149)
1) Iorga, M.; Feldman, L.; Barton, R.; Martin, M. J.; Goren, N.; Mahmoudi, C. Fog computing conceptual model. NIST Special Publication 500-325 (2018), https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.500-325.
2) Chen, S.; Zhang, T.; and Shi, W. (Eds.) Fog computing. IEEE Internet Computing 21, 2 (2017).
Bookmark and Share
  Reviewer Selected
Featured Reviewer
 
 
Distributed Networks (C.2.1 ... )
 
 
Centralization/ Decentralization (K.6.4 ... )
 
 
Distributed Objects (D.2.12 ... )
 
 
Distributed Systems (D.4.7 ... )
 
 
Distributed Systems (H.3.4 ... )
 
 
Interoperability (D.2.12 )
 
Would you recommend this review?
yes
no
Other reviews under "Distributed Networks": Date
Data communications and distributed networks (2nd ed.)
Black U., Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1987. Type: Book (9789780835913416)
Sep 1 1988
Fault-tolerant routing in DeBruijn communication networks
Esfahanian A., Hakimi S. IEEE Transactions on Computers 34(9): 777-788, 1985. Type: Article
Jun 1 1986
SAA/LU6.2: distributed networks and applications
Edmunds J., McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 1992. Type: Book (9780070190221)
Jan 1 1994
more...

E-Mail This Printer-Friendly
Send Your Comments
Contact Us
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.   Copyright 1999-2024 ThinkLoud®
Terms of Use
| Privacy Policy