Fog Node Self-Control Middleware: Enhancing context awareness towards autonomous decision making in Fog Colonies

Abstract

The concept of Fog Colonies has recently been introduced in Fog Computing, and is rapidly gaining attention. As Fog Colonies are extended, Fog Colony Control mechanisms have gained significant interest. Although, there are numerous solutions efficiently supporting a Context Aware coordinating entity, exploring approaches for decentralized control remains a challenge. Towards this direction, there are efforts promoting the concept of autonomous Fog Nodes, making their own decisions with internalized control without the existence of a coordinating entity. In this paper we propose and implement a Context Aware Self-Control management middleware for Fog Nodes, enabling their Self-Management utilizing contextual information shared between Fog colony members. To that end, we employ Policy Rulebooks to define Context Aware Policies that each Fog Node can enforce. Finally, we evaluated the proposed middleware against a non Context Aware one, under exactly the same conditions, using a real-world smart building use case, focusing on performance issues related to the end-user.