EmuFog: Extensible and Scalable Emulation of Large-Scale Fog Computing Infrastructures

TL;DR

EmuFog is an extensible, scalable emulation framework that allows researchers to design, test, and evaluate large-scale Fog Computing infrastructures and applications in a controlled environment.

Contribution

It introduces EmuFog, a flexible framework for emulating Fog Computing scenarios with customizable topologies and workloads, supporting Docker-based applications.

Findings

Effective on synthetic and real-world topologies

Supports large-scale Fog infrastructure emulation

Eases experimental evaluation of Fog applications

Abstract

The diversity of Fog Computing deployment models and the lack of publicly available Fog infrastructure makes the design of an efficient application or resource management policy a challenging task. Such research often requires a test framework that facilitates the experimental evaluation of an application or protocol design in a repeatable and controllable manner. In this paper, we present EmuFog---an extensible emulation framework tailored for Fog Computing scenarios---that enables the from-scratch design of Fog Computing infrastructures and the emulation of real applications and workloads. EmuFog enables researchers to design the network topology according to the use-case, embed Fog Computing nodes in the topology and run Docker-based applications on those nodes connected by an emulated network. Each of the sub-modules of EmuFog are easily extensible, although EmuFog provides a default implementation for each of them. The scalability and efficacy of EmuFog are evaluated both on synthetic and real-world network topologies.