Container Orchestration in Edge and Fog Computing Environments for Real-Time IoT Applications

Resource management is the principal factor to fully utilize the potential of Edge/Fog computing to execute real-time and critical IoT applications. Although some resource management frameworks exist, the majority are not designed based on distributed containerized components. Hence, they are not suitable for highly distributed and heterogeneous computing environments. Containerized resource management frameworks such as FogBus2 enable efficient distribution of framework’s components alongside IoT applications’ components. However, the management, deployment, health check, and scalability of a large number of containers are challenging issues. To orchestrate a multitude of containers, several orchestration tools are developed. But, many of these orchestration tools are heavyweight and have a high overhead, especially for resource-limited Edge/Fog nodes. Thus, for hybrid computing environments, consisting of heterogeneous Edge/Fog and/or Cloud nodes, lightweight container orchestration tools are required to support both resource-limited resources at the Edge/Fog and resource-rich resources at the Cloud. Thus, in this paper, we propose a feasible approach to build a hybrid and lightweight cluster based on K3s, for the FogBus2 framework that offers containerized resource management framework. This work addresses the challenge of creating lightweight computing clusters in hybrid computing environments. It also proposes three design patterns for the deployment of the FogBus2 framework in hybrid environments, including (1) Host Network, (2) Proxy Server, and (3) Environment Variable. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed approach improves the response time of real-time IoT applications up to 29% with acceptable and low overhead.