Support mobile fog computing test in piFogBedII

Abstract

IoT and 5G technologies are making smart devices, medical devices, cameras and various types of sensors become parts of the Internet, which provides feasibility to the realization of infrastructure and services such as smart homes, smart cities, smart medical technology and smart transportation. Fog computing (edge computing) is a new research field and can accelerate the analysis speed and decision-making for these delay-sensitive applications. It is very important to test functions and performances of various applications and services before they are deployed to the production environment, and current evaluations are more based on various simulation tools; however, the fidelity of the experimental results is a problem for most of network simulation tools. PiFogBed is a fog computing testbed built with real devices, but it does not support the testing of mobile end devices and mobile fog applications. The paper proposes the piFogBedII to support the testing of mobile fog applications by modifying some components in the piFogBed, such as extending the range of end devices, adding the mobile and migration management strategy and inserting a container agent to implement the transparent transmission between end devices and containers. The evaluation results show that it is effective and the delay resulting from the migration strategy and container agent is acceptable.