Resource Provisioning in Fog Computing: From Theory to Practice †

Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Smart Cities continue to expand at enormous rates. Centralized Cloud architectures cannot sustain the requirements imposed by IoT services. Enormous traffic demands and low latency constraints are among the strictest requirements, making cloud solutions impractical. As an answer, Fog Computing has been introduced to tackle this trend. However, only theoretical foundations have been established and the acceptance of its concepts is still in its early stages. Intelligent allocation decisions would provide proper resource provisioning in Fog environments. In this article, a Fog architecture based on Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration platform, is proposed to solve this challenge. Additionally, a network-aware scheduling approach for container-based applications in Smart City deployments has been implemented as an extension to the default scheduling mechanism available in Kubernetes. Last but not least, an optimization formulation for the IoT service problem has been validated as a container-based application in Kubernetes showing the full applicability of theoretical approaches in practical service deployments. Evaluations have been performed to compare the proposed approaches with the Kubernetes standard scheduling feature. Results show that the proposed approaches achieve reductions of 70% in terms of network latency when compared to the default scheduling mechanism.

Towards delay-aware container-based Service Function Chaining in Fog Computing

“…Previously, in [20], we have tackled the problem of resource provisioning in Fog Computing. The present work builds further on our previous one since the SFC placement issue has now been addressed.…”

Horizontal Pod Autoscaling in Kubernetes for Elastic Container Orchestration

“…In References [25,26], the authors apply Kubernetes into resource provisioning for containerized fog computing applications. A network-aware scheduling algorithm that takes into account the network infrastructure such as nodes' CPU and RAM capacities, device types, and geographic locations to make provisioning decisions is proposed.…”

ElasticFog: Elastic Resource Provisioning in Container-Based Fog Computing

“…It enables the management and deployment of applications by considering the specific application requirements and different capabilities of heterogeneous Fog nodes. A network-aware scheduling approach is presented in [25], [26] for deploying containerbased applications in Fog computing. The authors extended the Kubernetes scheduler to consider network infrastructure status for taking resource provisioning decisions.…”