A Cooperative Fog Approach for Effective Workload Balancing

Fog Computing is an emerging paradigm, suitable to serve the particular needs of IoT networks. It includes the deployment of computational devices at the edge of the network facilitating faster real-time processing of time-sensitive data. In this article, we present a Fog architecture, which diverges from the traditional hierarchical and centralized Fog model, and adopts a cooperative model, which allows for a federation of Edge networks. In our proposal, the tasks that the nodes are called to complete, are characterized according to their computational nature and are subsequently allocated to the appropriate host. Edge networks communicate through a brokering system with IoT systems in an asynchronous way via the Pub/Sub messaging pattern.