Fog Computing Enabled Future Mobile Communication Networks: A Convergence of Communication and Computing

The convergence of communication and computing (COM2P) has been taken as a promising solution for the sustainable development of mobile communication systems. The introduction of fog computing in future mobile networks makes COM2P possible. This article provides an overview on fog computing enabled mobile communication networks (FogMNW), including network architecture, system capacity and resource management. First, this article analyzes the heterogeneity of FogMNW with both advanced communication techniques and fog computing. Then a heterogeneous communication and hierarchical fog computing network architecture is proposed. With both communication and computing resources, FogMNW is enabled to achieve much higher capacity than conventional communication networks. This has been well demonstrated by the coded multicast scheme. Furthermore, a systematic management of communication and computing resources is necessary for FogMNW. By exploiting the communication load diversity in N cells, a communication load aware CLA scheme can achieve much higher computing resource efficiency than comparing schemes. The performance gap increases with N, and CLA can improve efficiency by more than 100 percent when there are 14 cells.