Fog for 5G and IoT

1ParaDrop: An Edge Computing Platform in Home Gateways

SUMAN BANERJEE,¹ PENG LIU,^1,2 ASHISH PATRO,¹ and DALE WILLIS¹

¹ Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin‐Madison, Madison, WI, USA

² Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The last decade has seen a rapid diversification of computing platforms, devices, and services. For example, desktops used to be the primary computing platform until the turn of the century. Since then, laptops and more recently handheld devices such as laptops and tablets have been widely adopted. Wearable devices and the Internet of things (IoT) are the latest trends in this space. This has also led to widespread adoption of the “cloud” as a ubiquitous platform for supporting applications and services across these different devices.

Simultaneously, cloud computing platforms, such as Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, have become a popular approach to provide ubiquitous access to services across different user devices. Third‐party developers have come to rely on cloud computing platforms to provide high quality services to their end users, since they are reliable, always on, and robust. Netflix and Dropbox are examples of popular cloud‐based services. Cloud services require developers to host services, applications, and data on off‐site data centers. But, due to application‐specific reasons, a growing number of high quality services restrict computational tasks to be colocated with the end user. For example, ...