Fog Device-as-a-Service (FDaaS): A Framework for Service Deployment in Public Fog Environments

Abstract

Meeting the requirements of future services with time sensitivity and handling sudden load spikes of the services in Fog computing environments are challenging tasks due to the lack of publicly available Fog nodes and their characteristics. Researchers have assumed that the traditional autoscaling techniques, with lightweight virtualisation technology (containers), can be used to provide autoscaling features in Fog computing environments, few researchers have built the platform by exploiting the default autoscaling techniques of the containerisation orchestration tools or systems. However, the adoption of these techniques alone, in a publicly available Fog infrastructure, does not guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) due to the heterogeneity of Fog devices and their characteristics, such as frequent resource changes and high mobility. To tackle this challenge, in this work we developed a Fog as a Service (FaaS) framework that can create, configure and manage the containers which are running on the Fog devices to deploy services. This work presents the key techniques and algorithms which are responsible for handling sudden load spikes of the services to meet the QoS of the application. This work provides an evaluation by comparing it with existing techniques under real scenarios. The experiment results show that our proposed approach maximises the satisfied service requests by an average of 1.9 times in different scenarios.