Fog Computing for Augmented Reality: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities

Augmented reality applications are computationally intensive and have latency requirements in the range of 15-20 milliseconds. Fog computing addresses these requirements by providing on-demand computing capacity and lower latency by bringing the computational resources closer to the augmented reality devices. In this paper, we reviewed papers providing custom solutions for augmented reality using the fog architecture and identified that the ongoing research trends towards balancing quality-of-experience, energy, and latency for both single and collaborative multi-device augmented reality applications. Furthermore, some works also focus on providing architectures for fog-based augmented reality systems and also on the training of machine learning algorithms in the fog layers to improve user experience. Based on these findings, we provide some challenges and research directions that can facilitate the adoption of fog-based augmented reality systems.