Distributed analytics in fog computing platforms using tensorflow and kubernetes

Abstract

Modern Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications produce large amount of data and require powerful analytics approaches, such as Deep Learning to extract useful information. Existing IoT applications transmit the data to resource-rich data centers for analytics. However, it may congest networks, overload data centers, and increase security vulnerability. In this paper, we implement a platform, which integrates resources from data centers (servers) to end devices (IoT devices). We launch distributed analytics applications among the devices without sending everything to the data centers. We analyze challenges to implement such a platform and carefully adopt popular open-source projects to overcome the challenges. We then conduct comprehensive experiments on the implemented platform. The results show: (i) the benefits/limitations of distributed analytics, (ii) the importance of decisions on distributing an application across multiple devices, and (iii) the overhead caused by different components in our platform.