Managing Resources Continuity from the Edge to the Cloud: Architecture and Performance

The wide spread deployment of smart edge devices and applications that

require real-time data processing, have with no doubt created the need to

extend the reach of cloud computing to the edge, recently also referred to as

Fog or Edge Computing. Fog computing implements the idea of extending

the cloud where the "things" are, or in other words, improving application

performance and resource eciency by removing the need to processing all

the information in the cloud, thus also reducing bandwidth consumption in

the network. Fog computing is designed to complement cloud computing,

paving the way for a novel, enriched architecture that can benet from and

include both edge(fog) and cloud resources. From a resources perspective,

this combined scenario requires resource continuity when executing a service,

whereby the assumption is that the selection of resources for service execution

remains independent of their physical location. This new resources model,

i.e., resource continuity, has gained recently signicant attention, as it carries

potential to seamlessly providing a computing infrastructure from the edge

to the cloud, with an improved performance and resource eciency. In this

paper, we study the main architectural features of the managed resource

continuity, proposing the foundation of a coordinated management plane

responsible for resource continuity provisioning. We study an illustrative

example on the performance benets in relationship to the size of databases

with regard to the proposed architectural model.