An Integrated and Standards-based Fog Computing
Federation Framework
The conventional cloud-centric IoT application does not meet the requirement of
the quick reaction of time-critical applications. The idea of edge and fog computing
arrived to overcome the limitation of cloud computing in the domain of IoT applications. In fog
computing, the workloads get distributed across the fog devices,
and the placement of services in the nearest fog devices drastically reduces the network delay,
connectivity, and reliability issues and delivers real-time capabilities
as an extension, it reduces energy consumption and network overhead in the case
of large sensor networks. However, achieving seamless interoperability, platform
independence, and automatic deployment of services becomes the major challenge
over heterogeneous fog devices. This work proposes an adaptation of the OASIS - Topology and
Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA)
for service deployment for fog computing. With TOSCA, we build an integrated
and standards-based fog computing federation framework that abstracts all the
heterogeneity and complexities and offers a user-friendly paradigm to model and
dynamically deploy fog services, on-demand, on the fly, from a remote system. The
framework uses (i) standard TOSCA Service Template for application modeling.
(ii) Docker Containers (OS-level virtualization) for platform independence, and
(iii) Docker Swarm (container orchestration tool) manages seamless coordination
and cooperation across heterogeneous fog devices. Moreover, the fog application is
dynamically deployed by a lightweight TOSCA-compliant orchestrator on a set of
out-of-the-box fog devices. The case study on the framework indicates convincing
resource consumption by the orchestration process on these resource-constrained
fog devices. The framework realizes various fog applications through the dynamic
deployment of custom or user-developed services on the fly.
Thesis:
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