The Fog Development Kit: A Development Platform for SDN-based Edge-Fog Systems

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Fog Development Kit (FDK), a platform that simplifies the development and testing of fog computing applications by providing high-level interfaces and supporting both physical and emulated environments.

Contribution

It presents the FDK as a novel development platform that abstracts fog computing complexities and supports realistic testing environments, fostering innovation in fog-based applications.

Findings

Resource allocations are enforced under network congestion.

FDK supports seamless transition from emulation to physical deployment.

Scalability analysis shows FDK performs well with increasing network size.

Abstract

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing has emerged to help traditional cloud computing in meeting scalability demands. Fog computing makes it possible to fulfill real-time requirements of applications by bringing more processing, storage, and control power geographically closer to end-devices. However, since fog computing is a relatively new field, there is no standard platform for research and development in a realistic environment, and this dramatically inhibits innovation and development of fog-based applications. In response to these challenges, we propose the Fog Development Kit (FDK). By providing high-level interfaces for allocating computing and networking resources, the FDK abstracts the complexities of fog computing from developers and enables the rapid development of fog systems. In addition to supporting application development on a physical deployment, the FDK supports the use of emulation tools (e.g., GNS3 and Mininet) to create realistic environments, allowing fog application prototypes to be built with zero additional costs and enabling seamless portability to a physical infrastructure. Using a physical testbed and various kinds of applications running on it, we verify the operation and study the performance of the FDK. Specifically, we demonstrate that resource allocations are appropriately enforced and guaranteed, even amidst extreme network congestion. We also present simulation-based scalability analysis of the FDK versus the number of switches, the number of end-devices, and the number of fog-devices.