Fog Computing Challenges: A Systematic Review

This paper reports on a study of major Australian organisations that are using programs to achieve strategic transformation of their work. While the program management literature has focused on the coordination of the multiple projects and related operational activities within the programs, little is known about how these programs deploy efforts to coordinate activities in response to contextual pressures. This exploratory, multi-case study asserts that a significant effort is needed to coordinate responses to factors external to the program. In addition, this study shows the key internal and external forces that combine in shifting the locus of effort in coordinating and integrating multiple activities and projects in major transformation programs

Adaptive Energy-aware Scheduling of Dynamic Event Analytics across Edge and Cloud Resources

The growing deployment of sensors as part of Internet of Things (IoT) is generating thousands of event streams. Complex Event Processing (CEP) queries offer a useful paradigm for rapid decision-making over such data sources. While often centralized in the Cloud, the deployment of capable edge devices on the field motivates the need for cooperative event analytics that span Edge and Cloud computing. Here, we identify a novel problem of query placement on edge and Cloud resources for dynamically arriving and departing analytic dataflows. We define this as an optimization problem to minimize the total makespan for all event analytics, while meeting energy and compute constraints of the resources. We propose 4 adaptive heuristics and 3 rebalancing strategies for such dynamic dataflows, and validate them using detailed simulations for 100 - 1000 edge devices and VMs. The results show that our heuristics offer O(seconds) planning time, give a valid and high quality solution in all cases, and reduce the number of query migrations. Furthermore, rebalance strategies when applied in these heuristics have significantly reduced the makespan by around 20 - 25%.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Move with Me: Scalably keeping virtual objects close to users on the move

The upcoming Cloud-Fog interplay is expected to grant service providers more degrees of freedom in the implementation and management of their service portfolios. However, recent advances in Mobile Internet have developed a growing need to support user mobility - as users move, the Fog counterparts of services that require close proximity may call for migration(s) to meet the desired quality of service (QoS). With the state-of-the-art virtualization technologies, next-generation Cloud/Fog services are being implemented in modular software (i.e., as a graph/chain of portable virtual objects (VOs)) that can be migrated around the Telco infrastructure, and yet scalability is still an open issue, especially with the inter-datacenter bulk live migration of VOs. In this perspective, a VO clustering and migration policy that jointly considers user proximity and inter-VO affinity is proposed to scalably support user mobility, while allowing service differentiation among users. Results confirm that introducing migrations improve the QoS to always meet or exceed the requirements, as compared to static service placement, and considering VO clusters as aggregate entities will initiate around 40% less migrations, on average - an improvement that increases with inter-VO affinity and could potentially simplify service management when supporting user mobility

A scalable SDN slicing scheme for multi-domain fog/cloud services

By bringing Cloud-like services much closer to endusers and their devices, Fog computing is foreseen to expand the scope of overlay networks, encompassing different heterogeneity dimensions (i.e., size, geographical distribution, devices/virtual objects (VOs) involved, quality of service (QoS) requirements, etc.). Although highly flexible solutions like Software-Defined Networking (SDN) have been conceived to handle such heterogeneity in future networks, scalability is still an open issue, especially with respect to Fog computing requirements. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based network slicing scheme for supporting multi-domain Fog/Cloud services, which offers high scalability, among other aspects, over legacy ones. Results show that the number of unicast forwarding rules needed to be installed in an overlay drops by up to over one order of magnitude and 4 times compared to the "fully-meshed" and OpenStack cases, respectively, at the cost of possible path sub-optimality, albeit knowledge on the datacenter topology can be used for VO placement optimization

ElfStore: A Resilient Data Storage Service for Federated Edge and Fog Resources

Edge and fog computing have grown popular as IoT deployments become wide-spread. While application composition and scheduling on such resources are being explored, there exists a gap in a distributed data storage service on the edge and fog layer, instead depending solely on the cloud for data persistence. Such a service should reliably store and manage data on fog and edge devices, even in the presence of failures, and offer transparent discovery and access to data for use by edge computing applications. Here, we present Elfstore, a first-of-its-kind edge-local federated store for streams of data blocks. It uses reliable fog devices as a super-peer overlay to monitor the edge resources, offers federated metadata indexing using Bloom filters, locates data within 2-hops, and maintains approximate global statistics about the reliability and storage capacity of edges. Edges host the actual data blocks, and we use a unique differential replication scheme to select edges on which to replicate blocks, to guarantee a minimum reliability and to balance storage utilization. Our experiments on two IoT virtual deployments with 20 and 272 devices show that ElfStore has low overheads, is bound only by the network bandwidth, has scalable performance, and offers tunable resilience.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures, To appear in IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), Milan, Italy, 201

Fog function virtualization: A flexible solution for IoT applications

The Internet of Things applications must carefully assess certain crucial factors such as the real-time and largely distributed nature of the “things”. Fog Computing provides an architecture to satisfy those requirements through nodes located from near the “things” till the edge. The problem comes with the integration of the Fog nodes into current infrastructures. This process requires the development of complex software solutions and prevents Fog growth. In this paper we propose three innovations to enhance Fog: (i) a new orchestration policy, (ii) the creation of constellations of nodes, and (iii) Fog Function Virtualization (FFV). All together will complement Fog to reach its true potential as a generic scalable platform, running multiple IoT applications simultaneously. Deploying a new service is reduced to the development of the application code, fact that brings the democratization of the Fog Computing paradigm through ease of deployment and cost reduction.The authors thanks Rodolfo Milito for his insightful comments and revisions. Damian Roca work was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship provided by Fundación La Caixa. Josue V. Quiroga work was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship provided by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT). This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (Severo Ochoa grants SEV2015-0493) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contracts TIN2015-65316-P).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Toward understanding crowd mobility in smart cities through the Internet of Things

Understanding crowd mobility behaviors would be a key enabler for crowd management in smart cities, benefiting various sectors such as public safety, tourism and transportation. This article discusses the existing challenges and the recent advances to overcome them and allow sharing information across stakeholders of crowd management through Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The article proposes the usage of the new federated interoperable semantic IoT platform (FIESTA-IoT), which is considered as "a system of systems". The platform can support various IoT applications for crowd management in smart cities. In particular, the article discusses two integrated IoT systems for crowd mobility: 1) Crowd Mobility Analytics System, 2) Crowd Counting and Location System (from the SmartSantander testbed). Pilot studies are conducted in Gold Coast, Australia and Santander, Spain to fulfill various requirements such as providing online and offline crowd mobility analyses with various sensors in different regions. The analyses provided by these systems are shared across applications in order to provide insights and support crowd management in smart city environments.The pilot study in Gold Coast is conducted in collaboration with NEC Australia. This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government (MINECO) under Grant Agreement No. TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R ADVICE (Dynamic Provisioning of Connectivity in High Density 5G Wireless Scenarios) project and by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreements No. 731993 AUTOPILOT (Automated Driving Progressed by Internet Of Things), 643943 FIESTAIoT (Federated Interoperable Semantic IoT Testbeds and Applications), and 643275 FESTIVAL (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) projects and the joint project by NEC Laboratories Europe and Technische Universität Dortmund. The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the Spanish Government or European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors

Latency-aware cost optimization of the service infrastructure placement in 5G networks

Under 5G use case scenarios latency is a main challenge that must be addressed, since mission critical environments are mostly delay sensitive. To achieve this goal, the service infrastructure placement optimization is needed in the interest of minimizing the delays in the service access layer. To solve this problem, this paper mathematically models the placement problem in a Fog Computing/NFV environment as a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming problem and proposes a heuristic-based solution considering 5G mobile network requirements. As a practical result, an application was developed to achieve usability and flexibility while ensuring operational applicability of the proposed methods.Postprint (published version