SmartEdge: fog computing cloud extensions to support latency-sensitive IoT applications

Abstract

The rapid growth in the number of Internet-connected devices, associated to the increasing rates in popularity and demand for real-time and latency-constrained cloud application services makes the use of traditional cloud computing frameworks challenging to afford such environment. More specifically, the centralized approach traditionally adopted by current Data Center (DC) pose performance issues to suit a high density of cloud applications, mainly in terms to responsiveness and scalability. Our irreplaceable dependency on cloud computing, demands DC infrastructures always available while keeping, at the same time, enough performance capabilities for responding to a huge amount of cloud application requests. In this work, the applicability of the fog computing emerging paradigm is exploited to enhance the performance on supporting latency-sensitive cloud applications tailored for Internet of Things (IoT).With this goal in mind, we introduce a new service model named Edge Infrastructure as a Service (EIaaS), which seeks to offer a new edge computing tailored cloud computing service delivery model to efficiently suit the requirements of the real-time latency-sensitive IoT applications. With EIaaS approach, cloud providers are allowed to dynamically deploy IoT applications/services in the edge computing infrastructures and manage cloud/network resources at the run time, as means to keep IoT applications always best connected and best served. The resulting approach is modeled in a modular architecture, leveraging both container and Software-Defined Networking technologies to handle edge computing (CPU, memory, etc) and network resources (path, bandwidth, etc) respectively. Preliminary results show how the virtualization technique affects the performance of applications at the network edge infra. The container-based virtualization takes advantage over the hypervisor-based technique for deploying applications at the edge computing infrastructure, as it offers a great deal of flexibility under the presence of resource constraints.