A blockchain based approach for Fog infrastructure management leveraging on Non-Fungible Tokens

Fog computing solutions provide a consolidated way to quickly process the huge amount of data generated by IoT devices connected to the Internet. Different to cloud computing, Fog infrastructure achieve efficient data processing without excessive latency on data transfers. The blockchain technology supports distributed and reliable information storage mechanisms and, when combined with smart contracts, it can provide a distributed system where all the nodes independently contribute to a common global state. This provides inherent desirable features, such as immutability and transparency. In this work a blockchain based approach to address fault-tolerance and load balancing in smart environments at Fog level, is proposed. A Non-fungible Tokens based methodology, exploiting tailored smart contracts, is designed and implemented to manage load balancing and failover activities on container-oriented infrastructure. Preliminary results have show the effectiveness of the approach.