Fogbed: A Rapid-Prototyping Emulation Environment for Fog Computing

The fog computing paradigm extends cloud resources near data sources to overcome limitations of cloud-based IoT centralized architectures. Its involve the running of services and applications on the nodes between the IoT devices and the cloud. The prototyping and testing of these distributed software is challenging due to the fact that not only the fog service has to be tested but also its integration with management systems. Despite recent advances in fog platforms, there exists no readily available testbed which can help researchers to design and test real world fog applications. To this purpose, network simulators and cloud middleware are adapted to enable the investigation of fog solutions. This paper presents Fogbed, a framework and toolset integration for rapid prototyping of fog components in virtualized environments. Using a desktop approach, Fogbed enables the deployment of fog nodes as software containers under different network configurations. Its design meets the requirements of low cost, flexible setup and compatibility with real world technologies. Unlike current approaches, the proposed framework allows for the testing of fog components with third-party systems through standard interfaces. A scheme to observe the behavior of the environment is provided. A case study is presented to demonstrate a fog service analysis. In addition, future developments and research directions are discussed.