qCon: QoS-Aware Network Resource Management for Fog Computing

Abstract

Fog computing is a new computing paradigm that employs computation and network resources at the edge of a network to build small clouds, which perform as small data centers. In fog computing, lightweight virtualization (e.g., containers) has been widely used to achieve low overhead for performance-limited fog devices such as WiFi access points (APs) and set-top boxes. Unfortunately, containers have a weakness in the control of network bandwidth for outbound traffic, which poses a challenge to fog computing. Existing solutions for containers fail to achieve desirable network bandwidth control, which causes bandwidth-sensitive applications to suffer unacceptable network performance. In this paper, we propose qCon, which is a QoS-aware network resource management framework for containers to limit the rate of outbound traffic in fog computing. qCon aims to provide both proportional share scheduling and bandwidth shaping to satisfy various performance demands from containers while implementing a lightweight framework. For this purpose, qCon supports the following three scheduling policies that can be applied to containers simultaneously: proportional share scheduling, minimum bandwidth reservation, and maximum bandwidth limitation. For a lightweight implementation, qCon develops its own scheduling framework on the Linux bridge by interposing qCon’s scheduling interface on the frame processing function of the bridge. To show qCon’s effectiveness in a real fog computing environment, we implement qCon in a Docker container infrastructure on a performance-limited fog device—a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B board.

ElasticFog: Elastic Resource Provisioning in Container-Based Fog Computing

“…The platform is based on open-source technolo-gies (Openstack, Kubernetes, and Foggy), and it considers multiple parameters such as traditional requirements (e.g., RAM and CPU) and non-traditional ones (e.g., bandwidth, location), to select a location for application deployment. In [21], a QoS-aware network resource management framework for containers in Fog computing is proposed. The framework is lightweight and can be used to control the bandwidth of containers on Fog nodes.…”

Wireless‐Fog Mesh: A framework for in‐network computing of microservices in semipermanent smart environments

“…In addition to the orchestration tools, several authors have attempted to propose and implement orchestration tools for the deployment of microservices in nodes. In the research articles, 17,18,[26][27][28][29] authors included characteristic (computing capability) of participating nodes for installing microservices. Some authors 18,26,27 have also attempted to associate network characteristics for the distribution of microservices in fog devices.…”

“…Some research efforts 17,18 have been made to utilize underlying wireless network characteristics such as signalto-noise ratio (SNR) and available bandwidth for orchestration of containers over fog nodes. However, many other wireless network parameters can affect the outcome of container orchestration.…”

Smart Containers Schedulers for Microservices Provision in Cloud-Fog-IoT Networks. Challenges and Opportunities

“…In both cases it must be noted that proposals are restricted to smart containers' scheduling in cloud computing, and suggestions for smart containers' scheduling in Fog and IoT networks remains unexplored. Also, it is worth mentioning that other works can be found in recent literature related to containers' scheduling in fog/IoT networks as well as in cloud computing, such as [53][54][55][56][57]. However, these works do not propose specific optimized solutions for every cloud-fog-IoT interface.…”