As a common physical phenomenon, frost deposition is inevitable and always has significant negative effects on several industry fields, such as aerospace, aviation, and heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration. To accurately predict and control a frosting-defrosting cycle, there is a need to understand the interrelated heat, mass, and momentum transport phenomena within the frost and at the air frost interface, which is a moving boundary condition. Consequently, during the past several decades, there has been a continuous effort to advance the understanding and modeling of frost formation on cold surfaces on the basis of experimental, semi-empirical, theoretical, and numerical approaches. To provide an overview of the analytical tools for scholars, researchers, product developers, and policy designers, a review and a comparative analysis of the available literature on frosting characteristics, correlations, and mathematical models are presented in this study. The mechanisms of the frost formation process and its influence will be first introduced, followed by the presentation of methods for the measurement of the frost layer thickness and the frosting rate. Then, the frost characteristics, including the accumulation, the density, the thermal conductivity and morphology, and the heat and mass transfer coefficients, will be summarized. The existing gaps in the research works on frost will be identified, and recommendations will be offered as per the viewpoint of the present authors. Finally, the conclusions of this study will be given. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.