# Fog-Based CDN Framework for Minimizing Latency of Web Services Using Fog-Based HTTP Browser
###### Abstract  
Cloud computing has been a dominant computing paradigm for many years. It provides applications with computing, storage, and networking capabilities. Furthermore, it enhances the scalability and quality of service (QoS) of applications and offers the better utilization of resources. Recently, these advantages of cloud computing have deteriorated in quality. Cloud services have been affected in terms of latency and QoS due to the high streams of data produced by many Internet of Things (IoT) devices, smart machines, and other computing devices joining the network, which in turn affects network capabilities. Content delivery networks (CDNs) previously provided a partial solution for content retrieval, availability, and resource download time. CDNs rely on the geographic distribution of cloud servers to provide better content reachability. CDNs are perceived as a network layer near cloud data centers. Recently, CDNs began to perceive the same degradations of QoS due to the same factors. Fog computing fills the gap between cloud services and consumers by bringing cloud capabilities close to end devices. Fog computing is perceived as another network layer near end devices. The adoption of the CDN model in fog computing is a promising approach to providing better QoS and latency for cloud services. Therefore, a fog-based CDN framework capable of reducing the load time of web services was proposed in this paper. To evaluate our proposed framework and provide a complete set of tools for its use, a fog-based browser was developed. We showed that our proposed fog-based CDN framework improved the load time of web pages compared to the results attained through the use of the traditional CDN. Different experiments were conducted with a simple network topology against six websites with different content sizes along with a different number of fog nodes at different network distances. The results of these experiments show that with a fog-based CDN framework offloading autonomy, latency can be reduced by 85% and enhance the user experience of websites. c Content delivery networks; content offloading framework; fog-based HTTP browser; fog computing +
Footnote †: journal: _Future Internet_  
Content delivery networks (CDNs) have become a crucial component in today's internet infrastructure to overcome issues regarding content availability. CDNs replicate data to trusted servers located closer to consumers. Cloudflare, one of the main CDN providers in the cloud service industry, managed to reduce the requests to the main cloud server by 65% and saved 60% of the network bandwidth as their cache servers were located near their consumers [2]. Pushing data closer to consumers is a characteristic that is shared between CDNs and the promising fog computing paradigm. According to the OpenFog Consortium, fog computing is defined as a system-level horizontal architecture that distributes resources and services of computing, storage, control, and networking anywhere along the continuum from cloud to things, thereby accelerating the velocity of decision making [3]. In simple terms, fog computing is cloud computing close to consumers. CDNs improve the latency of centralized cloud servers by pushing content (both static and dynamic) to other cloud servers that are geographically distributed and closer to consumer regions. This approach previously proved its efficiency in reducing network congestion to the main servers and in improving the response time of services; but this approach also moved latency issues to edge servers. Due to the recent increase in the number of online services, these edge servers will have to handle latency issues and network congestion in a different manner. Given that the fog stratum is dynamic, and the fog nodes are not visible nor controlled by service developers and administrators, it becomes hard for cloud providers to utilize the fog stratum efficiently. This paper proposes a fog-CDN framework capable of reducing the loading time of web services and their latencies by utilizing fog node capabilities.