Application Management in Fog Computing Environments: A Taxonomy, Review and Future Directions

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is being rapidly adopted for the creation of smart environments in various domains. The IoT-enabled cyber-physical systems associated with smart city, healthcare, Industry 4.0 and Agtech handle a huge volume of data and require data processing services from different types of applications in real time. The Cloud-centric execution of IoT applications barely meets such requirements as the Cloud datacentres reside at a multi-hop distance from the IoT devices. Fog computing, an extension of Cloud at the edge network, can execute these applications closer to data sources. Thus, Fog computing can improve application service delivery time and resist network congestion. However, the Fog nodes are highly distributed and heterogeneous, and most of them are constrained in resources and spatial sharing. Therefore, efficient management of applications is necessary to fully exploit the capabilities of Fog nodes. In this work, we investigate the existing application management strategies in Fog computing and review them in terms of architecture, placement and maintenance. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy and highlight the research gaps in Fog-based application management. We also discuss a perspective model and provide future research directions for further improvement of application management in Fog computing.