Fog System Configuration Management with CRDTs

TL;DR

This paper proposes using CRDTs for fog system configuration management to reduce latency and improve availability, addressing limitations of traditional centralized approaches in geo-distributed environments.

Contribution

It introduces a CRDT-based configuration management approach for fog systems, demonstrating its effectiveness through a prototype implementation on FReD with significant latency improvements.

Findings

Server response times reduced by up to 50%

CRDTs improve availability in geo-distributed fog environments

Prototypical implementation validates the approach

Abstract

Current fog systems rely on centralized and strongly consistent services for configuration management originally designed for cloud systems. In the geo-distributed fog, such systems can exhibit high communication latency or become unavailable in case of network partition. In this paper, we examine the drawbacks of strong consistency for fog configuration management and propose an alternative based on CRDTs. We prototypically implement our approach for the FReD fog data management platform. Early results show reductions of server response times of up to 50\%.