Towards Distributed Coordination for Fog Platforms

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized coordination approach tailored for fog platforms, addressing the challenges of unreliable networks and high latency in distributed fog and edge applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized coordination strategy that allows fog systems to specify coordination strategies and membership, overcoming limitations of cloud-based methods.

Findings

Enables coordination in unreliable, high-latency networks

Supports flexible configuration and state management for fog applications

Improves feasibility of distributed fog platform management

Abstract

Distributed fog and edge applications communicate over unreliable networks and are subject to high communication delays. This makes using existing distributed coordination technologies from cloud applications infeasible, as they are built on the assumption of a highly reliable, low-latency datacenter network to achieve strict consistency with low overheads. To help implement configuration and state management for fog platforms and applications, we propose a novel decentralized approach that lets systems specify coordination strategies and membership for different sets of coordination data.