Optimizing Data Processing: A Comparative Study of Big Data Platforms in Edge, Fog, and Cloud Layers

Intelligent applications in several areas increasingly rely on big data solutions to improve their efficiency, but the processing and management of big data incur high costs. Although cloud-computing-based big data management and processing offer a promising solution to provide scalable and abundant resources, the current cloud-based big data management platforms do not properly address the high latency, privacy, and bandwidth consumption challenges that arise when sending large volumes of user data to the cloud. Computing in the edge and fog layers is quickly emerging as an extension of cloud computing used to reduce latency and bandwidth consumption, resulting in some of the processing tasks being performed in edge/fog-layer devices. Although these devices are resource-constrained, recent increases in resource capacity provide the potential for collaborative big data processing. We investigated the deployment of data processing platforms based on three different computing paradigms, namely batch processing, stream processing, and function processing, by aggregating the processing power from a diverse set of nodes in the local area. Herein, we demonstrate the efficacy and viability of edge-/fog-layer big data processing across a variety of real-world applications and in comparison to the cloud-native approach in terms of performance.