The Role of Hybrid IoT with Cloud Computing and Fog Computing to Help the Oil and Gas Industry Recover from Covid-19 and Face Future Challenges
Authors: Alkamil Ethar H. K. , Mutlag Ammar A. , Alsaffar Haider W. , Sabah Mustafa H. 
Published: September 2021

Recently, the oil and gas industry faced several crucial challenges affecting the global energy market, including the Covid-19 outbreak, fluctuations in oil prices with considerable uncertainty, dramatically increased environmental regulations, and digital cybersecurity challenges. Therefore, the industrial internet of things (IIoT) may provide needed hybrid cloud and fog computing to analyze huge amounts of sensitive data from sensors and actuators to monitor oil rigs and wells closely, thereby better controlling global oil production. Improved quality of service (QoS) is possible with the fog computing, since it can alleviate challenges that a standard isolated cloud can't handle, an extended cloud located near underlying nodes is being developed.

The paradigm of cloud computing is not sufficient to meet the needs of the already extensively utilized IIoT (i.e., edge) applications (e.g., low latency and jitter, context awareness, and mobility support) for a variety of reasons (e.g., health care and sensor networks). Couple of paradigms just like mobile edge computing, fog computing, and mobile cloud computing, have arisen in recently to meet these criteria. Fog computing helps to optimize services and create better user experiences, such as faster responses for critical, time-sensitive needs. At the same time, it also invites problems, such as overload, underload, and disparity in resource usage, including latency, time responses, throughput, etc.

The comprehensive review presented in this work shows that fog devices have highly constrained environments and limited hardware capabilities. The existing cloud computing infrastructure is not capable of processing all data in a centralized manner because of the network bandwidth costs and response latency requirements. Therefore, fog computing demonstrated, instead of edge computing, and referred to as "the enabling technologies allowing computation to be performed at the edge of the network, on downstream data on behalf of cloud services and upstream data on behalf of IIoT services" (Shi et al., 2016) is more effective for data processing when data sources are close together. A review of fog and cloud computing literature suggests that fog is better than cloud computing because fog computing performs time-dependent computations better than cloud computing. The cloud is inefficient for latency-sensitive multimedia services and other time-sensitive applications since it is accessible over the internet, like the real-time monitoring, automation, and optimization of petroleum industry operations.

As a result, a growing number of IIoT projects are dispersing fog computing capacity throughout the edge network as well as through data centers and the public cloud. A comprehensive review of fog computing features is presented here, with the potential of using it in the petroleum industry. Fog computing can provide a rapid response for applications through preprocess and filter data. Data that has been trimmed can then be transmitted to the cloud for additional analysis and better service delivery.