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A new era for cities with fog computing

Abstract:

In this article, the authors dissect the technical challenges that cities face when implementing smart city plans and outlines the design principles and lessons learned after they carried out a flagship initiative on fog computing in Barcelona. In particular, they analyze what they call the Quadruple Silo (QS) problem - that is, four categories of silos that cities confront after deploying commercially available solutions. Those silo categories are: physical (hardware) silos, data silos, and service management silos, and the implications of the three silos in administrative silos. The authors show how their converged cloud/fog paradigm not only helps solve the QS problem, but also meets the requirements of a growing number of decentralized services - an area in which traditional cloud models fall short. The article exposes cases in which fog computing is a must, and shows that the reasons for deploying fog are centered much more on operational requirements than on performance issues related to the cloud.