Towards Dynamic On-Demand Fog Computing Formation Based On Containerization Technology

The advantage of having fog nodes near IOT devices can be seen by bringing intelligence near the edge. Fogs form storage place, real time processing for the tremendous amount of data generated by sensors, host for users' services to provide a better quality of service with a fast response time, and most importantly saving the IOT devices energy. If a fog is not present near an IOT device, its advantage will simply be eliminated. The current fogs in the literature are preconfigured in specific locations having some specific services running on them all the time which limits their diverse availabilities and prevent dynamic update and context adaptation. In this paper, we address the aforementioned limitations by proposing on-demand fog formation to create and manage fog devices and services on the fly. Our approach benefits from the containerization technology like Docker to build fog environment on-demand with the least initialization costs possible using volunteering devices and Kubernetes utility called Kubeadm, which allows monitoring fog nodes and orchestrates their services in a highly dynamic environment. A testing strategy composed of real devices is used and promising results are presented illustrating the ability and efficiency of initializing fog devices on the fly anywhere and whenever needed.