Quantum-Based Resource Management Approaches in Fog Computing Environments: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

The proliferation of the Internet of things (IoT) has enabled the penetration of many smart devices in order to enhance the life quality of people. The IoT devices generate unprecedented amounts of data, and IoT services mandate faster processing of those generated data. Current explorations use cloud computing as a foundation to process latency-sensitive IoT applications. Nevertheless, cloud environment has limitations in terms of geographical centralized architecture, multi-hop distance from the data source which adversely affects the latency sensitivity of the IoT services. To combat this issue, the fog computing has emerged as a promising paradigm that provides cloud-like elastic services to the close proximity of end devices. Hence, fog-assisted cloud computing environments can be used to execute the time-critical IoT applications. However, the fog environment includes the large number of fog devices which are typically resource-constrained, heterogeneous, distributed, dynamic, and less energy-efficient than the centralized cloud. Hence, the efficient secure resource management in fog is still a challenging issue. Quantum computing techniques can be envisioned as an effective means of providing secure and efficient resource management solutions in fog environments. Therefore, this paper discusses the concerns and challenges associated with the quantum computing-based fog resource management approaches and highlights the promising future research directions.