TRAILS: Extending TOSCA NFV profiles for liability management in the Cloud-to-IoT continuum

To address the growing amount of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), 5G, Fog and Edge computing converge to form a Cloud-to-IoT continuum. This complex multi-layer architecture involves several actors among which responsibilities may be blurred. Existing profiles mostly describe deployment aspects and elude responsibility, accountability or liability characteristics. Moreover, the multiplicity of component profiles prevents uniform service management. This paper proposes TRAILS (sTakeholder Responsibility, AccountabIity and Liability deScriptor), an extension of the TOSCA NFV profile that merges the existing profiles and adds a description of the responsibilities and accountabilities of supply chain actors. This allows a uniform and liability-aware management of services involving IoT devices, fog, edge and cloud nodes. To show the usability of our model, we discuss the ecosystem around the generation of the proposed extension as well as its application in an ontology-based referencing module of a liability-aware service manager that we designed.