Fog Necessity Over Cloud Computing For Healthcare Applications

Abstract

The increased amount of data generated through the communication devices, hampered the manner of data storage locally in the computers. Innovative solution for dealing this problem are cloud computing systems. On the other side, smart devices, as a part of the rapid technology evolution, become an important part of our daily lives, to the extent that the quality if our lives depend on them. This led to a necessity for development of new technological architecture that will support the cloud systems towards overcoming their drawbacks appearing at the edge network. In that direction, fog computing is a novelty that solves the cloud issues by placing the computational analysis and storage closer to the network edge. In this paper, the effect of fog computing paradigm in healthcare applications is investigated with respect to the latency and network usage. A detailed analysis regarding both performances are proved, first, when only cloud environment is present and then when fog computing is added. The results prove that managing data closer to the network edge, or by applying fog, decreases latency and network usage by a considerable amount, than compared to transferring data to the cloud which increases the network traffic congestion.