Context Diffusion in Fog Colonies: Exploring Autonomous Fog Node Operation Using ECTORAS

Abstract

In Fog Computing, fog colonies are formed by nodes cooperating to provide services to end-users. To enable efficient operation and seamless scalability of fog colonies, decentralized control over participating nodes should be promoted. In such cases, autonomous Fog Nodes operate independently, sharing the context in which all colony members provide their services. In the paper, we explore different techniques of context diffusion and knowledge sharing between autonomous Fog Nodes within a fog colony, using ECTORAS, a publish/subscribe protocol. With ECTORAS, nodes become actively aware of their operating context, share contextual information and exchange operational policies to achieve self-configuration, self-adaptation and context awareness in an intelligent manner. Two different ECTORAS implementations are studied, one offering centralized control with the existence of a message broker, to manage colony participants and available topics, and one fully decentralized, catering to the erratic topology that Fog Computing may produce. The two schemes are tested as the Fog Colony size is expanding in terms of performance and energy consumption, in a prototype implementation based on Raspberry Pi nodes for smart building management.

Keywords

• Fog Colony Control
• autonomous nodes
• context awareness
• publish/subscribe protocols