CEFIoT: A fault-tolerant IoT architecture for edge and cloud

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT), the emerging computing infrastructure that refers to the networked interconnection of physical objects, incorporates a plethora of digital systems that are being developed by means of a large number of applications. Many of these applications administer data collection on the edge and offer data storage and analytics capabilities in the cloud. This raises the following problems: (i) the processing stages in IoT applications need to have separate implementations for both the edge and the cloud, (ii) the placement of computation is inflexible with separate software stacks, as the optimal deployment decisions need to be made at runtime, and (iii) unified fault tolerance is essential in case of intermittent long-distance network connectivity problems, malicious harming of edge devices, or harsh environments. This paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant architecture CEFIoT for IoT applications by adopting state-ofthe-art cloud technologies and deploying them also for edge computing. We solve the data fault tolerance issue by exploiting the Apache Kafka publish/subscribe platform as the unified high-performance data replication solution offering a common software stack for both the edge and the cloud. We also deploy Kubernetes for fault-tolerant management and the advanced functionality allowing on-the-fly automatic reconfiguration of the processing pipeline to handle both hardware and network connectivity based failures.

A Decentralized Latency-Aware Task Allocation and Group Formation Approach With Fault Tolerance for IoT Applications

“…Technologies based on container-based virtualization have been used by [8] for fault-tolerance systems. Javed et al [33] explored fault tolerance and automated recovery in a small edge cluster by using Containers, Kubernetes, and Apache Kafka. In [36] a distributed fault tolerant system for dynamic IoT environment is proposed, where each device maintains consistent view of duplicated services.…”

A Distributed Framework Based on Publish-Subscribe to Monitor Beyond 5G Networks

“…And finally, moving to Beyond 5G networks, requiring flexible scenarios that may be probably oriented to Edge environments, there are already several proposals that include the definition of a publish-subscribe mechanism to distribute data between different entities in Edge-based deployments. This is the case of [14] or [15], although they are mostly focused on IoT and pure Edge platforms, not including 5G communications. There are also other proposals not related to the publish-subscribe system, such as [16], which analyzes the optimal placement and scaling of monitoring functions in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) environments, but it does not consider multi-site nor multi-stakeholder scenarios, which is a feature that characterizes the solution presented in this paper.…”

Complex Patterns of Failure: Fault Tolerance via Complex Event Processing for IoT Systems

“…Javed et al [26] proposed CEFIoT to provide FT using: (1) Docker, for consistency across cloud and edge; (2) Kafka, to replicate and buffer data when disconnected from the cloud; and (3) Kubernetes, for reconfiguration to handle hardware and network failures. Their evaluation used 5 Raspberry Pis with attached cameras that replicated images across devices.…”