(We created the Comcast Innovation Fund to support important research into the future of the Internet, with a focus on broadband, security and open-source development. In this series, we highlight grantees and their work.)

The Comcast Innovation Fund is pleased to announce the award of a grant to Princeton University. This grant will support research into “Cloud to Fog” under the direction of Dr. Mung Chiang.

Fog networking is an architectural approach that seeks to make networks more efficient by pushing network intelligence and processing capabilities closer to end users. In the fog-networking paradigm, the question of whether to carry out clients' tasks using cloud infrastructure or edge devices/things near the users is not a binary choice.  Instead, cloud and edge form a mutually beneficial, interdependent continuum.

This research project focuses on the labor and timescale division functionality of the Cloud-to-Fog interface in the areas of storage, communication and management. These areas lead to different research topics that include but are not limited to control plane design, distributed architecture design, and task scheduling and assignment algorithm design. This project highlights the challenges and solution approaches in building a unified interface framework between edge and cloud under the fog-networking paradigm. The project seeks to advance the understanding of fog networking by: (1) bridging the centralized cloud infrastructure and the distributed edge architecture; (2) providing motivations, incentives and service quality assurances to the users; (3) proposing practical solution schemes for labor division and tasks assignment.

We’re excited to see where this research goes, and to continue supporting exciting projects like this one through the Comcast Innovation Fund.