'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
An increasing number of Low Latency Applications (LLAs) in the entertainment, IoT, and automotive domains require response times that challenge the traditional application provisioning using distant Data Centres. Fog computing paradigm extends cloud computing at the edge and middle-tier locations of the network, providing response times an order of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the current "client-to-cloud" network model. Here, we address the challenges of provisioning heavily stateful LLA in the setting where fog infrastructure consists of third-party computing resources, i.e., cloudlets, that comes in the form of "data centres in the box". We introduce FogSpot, a charging mechanism for on-path, on-demand, application provisioning. In FogSpot, cloudlets offer their resources in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs) via markets, collocated with the cloudlets, that interact with forwarded users' application requests for VMs in real time. FogSpot associates each cloudlet with a spot price based on current application requests. The proposed mechanism's design takes into account the characteristics of cloudlets' resources, such as their limited elasticity, and LLAs' attributes, like the expected QoS gain and engagement duration. Lastly, FogSpot guarantees end users' requests truthfulness while focusing in maximising either each cloudlet's revenue or resource utilisation
