What is "Fog computing"?
Fog Computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage, and application services to end-users. The distinguishing Fog characteristics are its proximity to end-users, its dense geographical distribution, and its support for mobility. Services are hosted at the network edge or even end devices such as set-top-boxes or access points. By doing so, Fog reduces service latency, and improves QoS, resulting in superior user-experience. Fog Computing supports emerging Internet of Everything (IoE) applications that demand real-time/predictable latency (industrial automation, transportation, networks of sensors and actuators). Thanks to its wide geographical distribution the Fog paradigm is well positioned for real time big data and real time analytics. Fog supports densely distributed data collection points, hence adding a fourth axis to the often mentioned Big Data dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity).
Unlike traditional data centers, Fog devices are geographically distributed over heterogeneous platforms, spanning multiple management domains. Cisco is interested in innovative proposals that facilitate service mobility across platforms, and technologies that preserve end-user and content security and privacy across domains.
Fog provides unique advantages for services across several verticals such as IT, entertainment, advertising, personal computing etc. Cisco is specially interested in proposals that focus on Fog Computing scenarios related to Internet of Everything (IoE), Sensor Networks, Data Analytics and other data intensive services to demonstrate the advantages of such a new paradigm, to evaluate the trade-offs in both experimental and production deployments and to address potential research problems for those deployments.
From http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac50/ac207/crc_new/university/RFP/rfp13078.html
Perhaps it's not what they were driving at, but what came through to me might be described as "distributed cloud" computing - instead of collecting such data at a central (named) site or complex, the data resides "locally" with respect to it's origin, and accessed via an ip address based (or name server based) location mechanism - similar to dietributed computing mechanisms already in place, but data oriented. Any takers?
Cloud service: Service accessed remotely over the internet.
Fog service: Cloud service with caching mixed in. A fog service appears to be accessed from a central, Internet or corporate WAN accessible location, but is actually accessed locally, but the locally hosted service transparently caches or distributes, unbeknownst to the end user.