Towards a Proper Service Placement in Combined Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) Architectures

The Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered the development of a plethora of new services, fueled

by the deployment of devices located at the edge, providing multiple capabilities in terms of connectivity as

well as in data collection and processing. With the inception of the Fog Computing paradigm, aimed at

diminishing the distance between edge-devices and the IT premises running IoT services, the perceived service

latency and even the security risks can be reduced, while simultaneously optimizing the network usage. When

put together, Fog and Cloud computing (recently coined as fog-to-cloud, F2C) can be used to maximize the

advantages of future computer systems, with the whole greater than the sum of individual parts. However, the

specifics associated with cloud and fog resource models require new strategies to manage the mapping of novel

IoT services into the suitable resources. Despite few proposals for service offloading between fog and cloud

systems are slowly gaining momentum in the research community, many issues in service placement, both

when the service is ready to be executed admitted as well as when the service is offloaded from Cloud to Fog,

and vice-versa, are new and largely unsolved. In this paper, we provide some insights into the relevant features

about service placement in F2C scenarios, highlighting main challenges in current systems towards the

deployment of the next-generation IoT services.