Service Orchestration in Fog Environments

Abstract

A new era of automated services has permeated user's daily lives thanks to paradigms such as Smart City and the Internet of Things. This shift from traditional applications is possible due to the massive amount of heterogeneous devices that constitute the Internet of Things. To provide newly improved characteristics to these services, such as mobility support, high resilience, and low latency, an extension to the Cloud computing paradigm was created, called Fog computing, which brings processing and storage resources towards the edge of the network, in the vicinity of the Internet of Things environment. This scenario implies a higher complexity level needed to coordinate available resources and how applications and services use them. Although some solutions have been proposed for the Cloud, several characteristics differentiate the Cloud from the Fog, creating the need for new mechanisms for the coordination of resources, applications, and services in the Fog. This paper explains the challenges present in the Fog that call for new mechanisms to later propose an architecture to manage resources in the Fog using a hybrid approach. In the Internet of Things and South-Bound Fog Levels, a distributed management of applications and services is proposed applying choreography techniques to enable automated fast decision making. A centralized approach to orchestrate applications and services taking advantage of a global knowledge of the resources available in the network is suggested for the North-Bound Fog and Cloud Levels.