Incremental Deployment and Migration of Geo-distributed Situation Awareness Applications in the Fog

Geo-distributed Situation Awareness applications are large in scale and are characterized by 24/7 data generation from mobile and stationary sensors (such as cameras and GPS devices); latency-sensitivity for converting sensed data to actionable knowledge; and elastic and bursty needs for computational resources. Fog computing [7] envisions providing computational resources close to the edge of the network, consequently reducing the latency for the sense-process-actuate cycle that exists in these applications. We propose Foglets, a programming infrastructure for the geo-distributed computational continuum represented by fog nodes and the cloud. Foglets provides APIs for a spatio-temporal data abstraction for storing and retrieving application generated data on the local nodes, and primitives for communication among the resources in the computational continuum. Foglets manages the application components on the Fog nodes. Algorithms are presented for launching application components and handling the migration of these components between Fog nodes, based on the mobility pattern of the sensors and the dynamic computational needs of the application. Evaluation results are presented for a Fog network consisting of 16 nodes using a simulated vehicular network as the workload. We show that the discovery and deployment protocol can be executed in 0.93 secs, and joining an already deployed application can be as quick as 65 ms. Also, QoS-sensitive proactive migration can be accomplished in 6 ms.