PRE-Fog: IoT Trace Based Probabilistic
Resource Estimation at Fog
Mohammad Aazam, Marc St-Hilaire, Chung-Horng Lung, Ioannis Lambadaris
Department of Systems and Computer Engineering
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
aazam@ieee.org, marc_st_hilaire@carleton.ca, chlung@sce.carleton.ca, ioannis@sce.carleton.ca
Abstract— Lately, pervasive and ubiquitous computing services
have been under focus of not only the research community, but
developers as well. Different devices generate different types of
data with different frequencies. Emergency, healthcare, and latency
sensitive services require real-time responses. Also, it is necessary
to decide what type of data has to be uploaded to the cloud, without
burdening the core network and the cloud. For this purpose, the
cloud on the edge of the network, known as Fog or Micro
Datacenter (MDC), plays an important role. Fog resides between
the underlying Internet of Things (IoTs) and the mega datacenter
cloud. Its purpose is to manage resources, perform data filtration,
preprocessing, and security measures. To achieve this, Fog requires
an effective and efficient resource management framework, which
we propose in this paper. Fog has to deal with mobile nodes and
IoTs, which involves objects and devices of different types having a
fluctuating connectivity behavior. All such types of service
customers have an unpredictable relinquish probability, since any
object or device can stop using resources at any moment. In our
proposed methodology for resource estimation and management
through Fog computing, we take into account these factors and
formulate resource management on the basis of fluctuating
relinquish probability of the customer, service type, service price,
and variance of the relinquish probability. With the intent of
showing practical implications of our method, we implemented it
on Crawdad real trace and Amazon EC2 pricing. Based on various
services, differentiated through Amazon's price plans and historical
record of Cloud Service Customers (CSCs), the model determines
the amount of resources to be allocated. More loyal CSCs get better
services, while for the contrary case, the provider reserves
resources cautiously.
Index Terms—IoT; Cloud of Things; Fog computing; Edge
computing; Micro Datacenter (MDC); resource management.
I. INTRODUCTION
Connectivity has been revolutionized with the rapid
development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), healthcare
related services, smart phones, and other pervasive means. With
the advent of IoT; devices, services, and people are ubiquitously
connected almost all the time, generating a tremendous amount
of data. The objective of IoT is to provide a network
infrastructure with interoperable communication protocols and
softwares to allow interaction and integration of physical/virtual
sensors, computers, smart devices, vehicles, and dumb objects
like fridge, dishwasher, microwave oven, food items, medicines,
etc. [1].
The backbone of IoT communications is Machine-to-
Machine (M2M), although, not limited to it. In M2M
communications, two or more machines communicate with each
other directly, without human interventions. IoT enables non-
communicating devices to become part of the Internet and
communicate through data communications means such as bar-
code readers, RFID, etc. With the advancements in smartphone
technology, many objects would be able to be part of IoT through
various smartphone sensors. This way, non-intelligent nodes,
known as "things", become communicating and data generating
objects of IoT.
IoT-based services are gaining importance rapidly. Since
2011, the number of connected devices has already exceeded the
number of people on Earth. Already, the number of connected
devices have reached 9 billion and is expected to grow more
rapidly and reach 24 billion by 2020 [2]. With the increasing
number of heterogeneous devices connected to IoT and
generating data, it is no more possible for a standalone IoT to
perform power and bandwidth constrained tasks efficiently. IoT
and cloud computing amalgamation is becoming very important
[3]. There comes a situation when the cloud is connected with
IoT that generates multimedia data. Visual Sensor Network or
CCTV connected to cloud are examples of such a scenario. Since
multimedia content consumes more processing power, storage
space, and scheduling resources, it becomes important to manage
them effectively to perform efficient resource management in the
cloud. Specially, with mobile devices and other IoT nodes which
do not have a reliable connectivity behavior cost considerably
when it comes to resource allocation. Since resources are
reserved but due to mobility or fluctuating behavior, if resources
are given up, the datacenter has to manage the underutilization
scenarios. In addition, mission critical and latency sensitive IoT
services require very quick responses and processing. In that
case, it is not feasible to communicate through the distant cloud,
over the Internet. Fog computing plays a very vital role in this
regard [3]. Fog computing refers to bringing networking
resources close to the underlying networks. It is a network
between the underlying network(s) and the cloud(s). Fog
computing extends the traditional cloud computing paradigm to
2016 13th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)
978-1-4673-9292-1/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE 12