FogBus2: A lightweight and distributed container-based framework for integration of IoT-enabled systems with edge and cloud computing

Abstract

Edge/Fog computing is a novel computing paradigm that provides resource-limited Internet of Things (IoT) devices with scalable computing and storage resources. Compared to cloud computing, edge/fog servers have fewer resources, but they can be accessed with higher bandwidth and less communication latency. Thus, integrating edge/fog and cloud infrastructures can support the execution of diverse latency-sensitive and computation-intensive IoT applications. Although some frameworks attempt to provide such integration, there are still several challenges to be addressed, such as dynamic scheduling of different IoT applications, scalability mechanisms, multi-platform support, and supporting different interaction models. To overcome these challenges, we propose a lightweight and distributed container-based framework, called FogBus2. It provides a mechanism for scheduling heterogeneous IoT applications and implements several scheduling policies. Also, it proposes an optimized genetic algorithm to obtain fast convergence to well-suited solutions. Besides, it offers a scalability mechanism to ensure efficient responsiveness when either the number of IoT devices increases or the resources become overburdened. Also, the dynamic resource discovery mechanism of FogBus2 assists new entities to quickly join the system. We have also developed two IoT applications, called Conway's Game of Life and Video Optical Character Recognition to demonstrate the effectiveness of FogBus2 for handling real-Time and non-real-Time IoT applications. Experimental results show FogBus2's scheduling policy improves the response time of IoT applications by 53% compared to other policies. Also, the scalability mechanism can reduce up to 48% of the queuing waiting time compared to frameworks that do not support scalability.