Elastic Provisioning of Internet of Things Services Using Fog Computing: An Experience Report

The adoption of cloud and fog computing techniques for elastic provisioning of quality-constrained industrial Internet of Things (IoT) services is largely envisioned as very promising, but experience reports and lessons learned from real deployment still lack. To fill this gap, this paper presents and reports the evaluation of a system consisting of virtual services in a combined fog, cloud, and IoT setting, made up of multiple devices with varying computation capabilities. In particular, we have utilized and integrated off-the-shelf solutions into our architecture and have experimentally investigated the benefits of virtualization to move and redeploy mobile components to the fog nodes closest to the targeted end devices. In addition, the paper proposes an original solution to dynamically scale and provision the resources for the fog computing layer by using geometric monitoring. The reported results show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed exploitation of both fog and cloud virtualized resources to enable scalability in the domain of IoT-assisted mobile presence services.