Evaluating the Benefits of Combined and Continuous Fog-to-Cloud Architectures

 The need to extend the features of Cloud computing to the edge of the network has fu-

eled the development of new computing architectures, such as Fog computing. When put

together, the combined and continuous use of fog and cloud computing, lays the foun-

dation for a new and highly heterogeneous computing ecosystem, making the most out

of both, cloud and fog. Incipient research eorts are devoted to propose a management

architecture to properly manage such combination of resources, such as the reference

architecture proposed by the OpenFog Consortium or the recent Fog-to-Cloud (F2C). In

this paper, we pay attention to such a combined ecosystem and particularly evaluate the

potential benets of F2C in dynamic scenarios, considering computing resources mobility

and dierent trac patterns. By means of extensive simulations we specically study

the aspects of service response time, network bandwidth occupancy, power consumption

and service disruption probability. The results indicate that a combined fog-to-cloud

architecture brings signicant performance benets in comparison with the traditional

standalone Cloud, e.g., over 50% reduction in terms of power consumption.