A hardware and environment-agnostic smart home architecture with containerized on-the-fly service offloading

Abstract

The Fog-based Home Automation Platform (FOGHA) is a novel Fog-based smart home platform that utilizes real-time containerized service deployment and task-offloading over its computing nodes. Fog is the middle computing layer that is physically near to the Things layer (connected appliances) and is composed of multiple Fog nodes that are orchestrated in a distributed manner. The architecture supports intra-Fog and inter-layer task offloading mechanisms via the real-time deployment of containerized services. The delay-sensitive services are mostly performed among Fog nodes, whereas the resource-demanding tasks are offloaded to the Cloud nodes. FOGHA utilizes software services as Docker containers, which is a novel approach for resource-scarce Fog nodes compared to existing automation platforms. Our experiments proved that resource-demanding tasks such as face recognition could also be collectively performed within the Fog layer, revealing that Fog layer nodes can provide the Cloud layer’s computational power and service variety.