A New Era for Cities with Fog Computing

In this article, the authors dissect the technical challenges that cities face when implementing smart city plans and outlines the design principles and lessons learned after they carried out a flagship initiative on fog computing in Barcelona. In particular, they analyze what they call the Quadruple Silo (QS) problem -- that is, four categories of silos that cities confront after deploying commercially available solutions. Those silo categories are: physical (hardware) silos, data silos, and service management silos, and the implications of the three silos in administrative silos. The authors show how their converged cloud/fog paradigm not only helps solve the QS problem, but also meets the requirements of a growing number of decentralized services -- an area in which traditional cloud models fall short. The article exposes cases in which fog computing is a must, and shows that the reasons for deploying fog are centered much more on operational requirements than on performance issues related to the cloud.