Towards Network-Aware Resource Provisioning in Kubernetes for Fog Computing Applications

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand at enormous rates. Smart Cities powered by connected sensors promise to transform public services from transportation to environmental monitoring and healthcare to improve citizen welfare. Furthermore, over the last few years, Fog Computing has been introduced to provide an answer to the massive growth of heterogeneous devices connected to the network. Nevertheless, providing a proper resource scheduling for delay-sensitive and data-intensive services in Fog Computing environments is still a key research domain. Therefore, in this paper, a network-aware scheduling approach for container-based applications in Smart City deployments is proposed. Our proposal has been validated on the Kubernetes platform, an open source orchestrator for the automatic management and deployment of micro-services. Our approach has been implemented as an extension to the default scheduling mechanism available in Kubernetes, enabling Kubernetes to make resource provisioning decisions based on the current status of the network infrastructure. Evaluations based on Smart City container-based applications have been carried out to compare the performance of the proposed scheduling approach with the standard scheduling feature available in Kubernetes. Results show that the proposed approach achieves reductions of 80% in terms of network latency when compared to the default scheduling mechanism.