Dependable Fog Computing: A Systematic Literature Review

Fog computing has been recently introduced to bridge the gap between cloud resources and the network edge. Fog enables low latency and location awareness, which is considered instrumental for the realization of IoT, but also faces reliability and dependability issues due to node mobility and resource constraints. This paper focuses on the latter, and surveys the state of the art concerning dependability and fog computing, by means of a systematic literature review. Our findings show the growing interest in the topic but the relative immaturity of the technology, without any leading research group. Two problems have attracted special interest: guaranteeing reliable data storage/collection in systems with unreliable and untrusted nodes, and guaranteeing efficient task allocation in the presence of varying computing load. Redundancy-based techniques, both static and dynamic, dominate the architectures of such systems. Reliability, availability and QoS are the most important dependability requirements for fog, whereas aspects such as safety and security, and their important interplay, have not been investigated in depth.