Alessandro Zanni

Feasibility of Fog Computing Deployment based on Docker Containerization over RaspberryPi

Fog computing is strongly emerging as a relevant and interest-attracting paradigm+technology for both the academic and industrial communities. However, architecture and methodological approaches are still prevalent in the literature, while few research activities have specifically targeted so far the issues of practical feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency of fog solutions over easily-deployable environments. In this perspective, this paper originally presents i) our fog-oriented framework for Internet-of-Things applications based on innovative scalability extensions of the open-source Kura gateway and ii) its Docker-based containerization over challenging and resource-limited fog nodes, i.e., RaspberryPi devices. Our practical experience and experimental work show the feasibility of using even extremely constrained nodes as fog gateways; the reported results demonstrate that good scalability and limited overhead can be coupled, via proper configuration tuning and implementation optimizations, with the significant advantages of containerization in terms of flexibility and easy deployment, also when working on top of existing, off-the-shelf, and limited-cost gateway nodes.

Towards better scalability for IoT-cloud interactions via combined exploitation of MQTT and CoAP

It is manifest the growing research and industrial interest in scalable solutions for the efficient integration of large amounts of deployed sensors and actuators (Internet of Things - IoT-devices) and cloud-hosted virtualized resources for elastic storage and processing (including big data online stream processing). Such relevant attention is also demonstrated by the emergence of interesting IoT-cloud platforms from industry and open-source communities, as well as by the flourishing research area of fog/edge computing, where decentralized virtual resources at edge nodes can support enhanced scalability and reduced latency via locality-based optimizations. In this perspective, this paper proposes an innovative distributed architecture combining machine-to-machine industry-mature protocols (i.e., MQTT and CoAP) in an original way to enhance the scalability of gateways for the efficient IoT-cloud integration. In addition, the paper presents how we have applied the approach in the practical experience of efficiently and effectively extending the implementation of the open-source gateway that is available in the industry-oriented Kura framework for IoT.

Automated offloading of android applications for computation/energy optimizations

Our work presents a methodology and a tool to optimize Android applications using mobile computation offloading techniques. Our demo provides a study about the compatibility of being offloaded of Android methods and a methodology to autonomously classify Android methods based on their functions.

A federation model to support semantic SPARQL queries for enterprise data governance

Data Governance and Federation in large complex organizations poses non-trivial challenges due to the integration of heterogeneous, distributed data sources. Semantic Web, and its de-facto standard query language — SPARQL — have proven to be key in defining and searching semantic over any sort of content on the Web, thus easily letting content clients discover hidden relationships among disparate data. However, current SPARQL support of Data Federation is fairly limited, making it impractical for real-world scenarios. Our work proposes an open and autonomous platform for Data Federation that overcome traditional SPARQL limitations and opens up unprecedented opportunities for Data Governance in large organizations.

A migration-enhanced edge computing support for mobile devices in hostile environments

First research activities are starting to recognize the suitability of edge computing approaches in several Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) application domains, for instance, to better address scalability issues and to improve reactivity via local control decisions and actuation. The paper originally proposes the design and implementation of an extended edge computing platform, specifically designed for the support of mobile services when provisioned in so-called hostile environments. In particular, our original platform is capable of proactive migration of virtualized functions in response to provision-time device mobility. The paper provides a practical contribution in terms of design and implementation of proactive migration as an extension of the Elijah platform, available for the community of researchers/practitioners in the field. In addition, the paper contributes with lessons learnt from deployment and experimentation, including experimental results about the performance achievable when adopting simple but effective strategies for proactive migration.