FogSpot: Spot Pricing for Application Provisioning in Edge/Fog Computing

An increasing number of Low Latency Applications (LLAs) in the entertainment, IoT, and automotive domains require response times that challenge the traditional application provisioning using distant Data Centres. The fog computing paradigm extends cloud computing at the edge and middle-tier locations of the network, providing response times an order of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the current client-to-cloud network model. Here, we address the challenges of provisioning heavily stateful LLA in the setting where fog infrastructure consists of third-party computing resources, i.e., cloudlets, that come in the form of data centres in the box. We introduce FogSpot, a charging mechanism for on-path, on-demand, application provisioning. In FogSpot, cloudlets offer their resources in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs) via markets, collocated with the cloudlets, that interact with forwarded users' application requests for VMs in real time. FogSpot associates each cloudlet with a price based on applications' demand. The proposed mechanism's design takes into account the characteristics of cloudlets' resources, such as their limited elasticity, and LLAs' attributes, like their expected QoS gain and engagement duration. Lastly, FogSpot guarantees the end users' requests truthfulness while focusing in maximising either each cloudlet's revenue or resource utilisation.

Automated summary

The fog computing paradigm extends cloud computing to meet the demands of low latency applications in the edge and middle locations of the network; FogSpot is a charging mechanism for on-path, on-demand application provisioning that provides virtual machine resources for cloudlets through markets, ensuring the truthfulness of end users' requests based on cloudlets' resource characteristics and LLAs' attributes.