URMILA: A Performance and Mobility-Aware Fog/Edge Resource Management Middleware

Abstract

Fog/ Edge computing is increasingly used to support a wide range of latency-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to its elastic computing capabilities that are offered closer to the users. Despite this promise, IoT applications with user mobility face many challenges since offloading the application functionality from the edge to the fog may not always be feasible due to the intermittent connectivity to the fog, and could require application migration among fog nodes due to user mobility. Likewise, executing the applications exclusively on the edge may not be feasible due to resource constraints and battery drain. To address these challenges, this paper describes URMILA, a resource management middleware that makes effective tradeoffs between using fog and edge resources while ensuring that the latency requirements of the IoT applications are met. We evaluate URMILA in the context of a real-world use case on an emulated but realistic IoT testbed.