Performance Analysis of Edge-Fog-Cloud Architectures in the Internet of Things

We present a general performance model for communication architectures in Internet of Things scenarios. The architecture involves three processing layers, i.e., edge, fog, and cloud computing. According to the objectives of edge and fog computing, we assume that a certain percentage of the data is finally processed at the edge and fog layer. The rest is forwarded to the next higher layer for further processing. Data processing is modeled as a sequence of queueing stations. This allows us to compute performance parameters such as throughput and response times at all layers. The main contribution of this paper is an easy to use method for IoT application designers that provides a very fast and very flexible parametric support for evaluating design trade-offs in edge-fog-cloud configurations.