Enabling Low-Latency Applications in Fog-Radio Access Networks

The ultra low-latency operations of communications and computing enable many potential IoT applications, and thus have gained widespread attention recently. Existing mobile devices and telecommunication systems may not be able to provide the highly desired low-latency computing and communications services. To meet the needs of those applications, we introduce the Fog-Radio Access Network (F-RAN) architecture, which brings the efficient computing capability of the cloud to the edge of the network. By distributing computing-intensive tasks to multiple F-RAN nodes, F-RAN has the potential to meet the requirements of those ultra low-latency applications. In this article, we first introduce the F-RAN and its rationale in serving ultra low-latency applications. Then we discuss the need for a service framework for F-RAN to cope with the complex tradeoff among performance, computing cost, and communication cost. Finally, we illustrate the mobile AR service as an exemplary scenario to provide insights for the design of the framework. Examples and numerical results show that ultra low-latency services can be achieved by the F-RAN by properly handling the tradeoff.