When Clones Flock Near the Fog

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal Vol. 5; no. 3; pp. 1914 - 1923
• Main Authors: Abdelwahab, Sherif, Zhang, Sophia, Greenacre, Ashley, Ovesen, Kai, Bergman, Kevin, Hamdaoui, Bechir
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.06.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Analytics; Cloning; Cloud computing; Delays; Device-to-device communication; Edge computing; Electronic devices; Fog; Game theory; Geographical distribution; Internet of Things; messages brokering; resource management; Servers; Social network services; ubiquitous computing
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2018.2817392

FogMQ is a message brokering and device cloning service in fog and edge computing. Excessive tail end-to-end latency occurs with conventional message brokers when a massive number of geographically distributed devices communicate through a message broker. Latency of broker-less messaging is highly dependent on computational resources of devices. Deviceto-device messaging does not necessarily ensure low messaging latency and cannot scale well for a large number of resourcelimited and geographically distributed devices. For each device, FogMQ provides a high capacity device cloning service that subscribes to device messages. The clones facilitate near-theedge data analytics in resourceful cloud compute nodes. Clones in FogMQ apply Flock; an algorithm mimicking flocking-like behavior and allows the clones to autonomously migrate between heterogeneous cloud platforms. Flock controls and minimizes the weighted tail end-to-end latency. We have implemented FogMQ and evaluated it in a geographically distributed testbed. In our functional evaluation, we show that FogMQ is stable and achieves a bounded tail end-to-end latency that is up to 34% less than existing brokering methods.