RA-FSD: a rate-adaptive fog service delivery platform

As the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies permeate people’s daily lives, the sheer number of IoT applications has been developed to provide a wide range of services. Among all, real-time IoT services start to draw increasing attentions. Conventionally, cloud plays the role as the service provider in IoT but is no longer considered as the rational option for the real-time services due to service transmission latency and communication overhead. Therefore, we propose a novel rate-adaptive fog service delivery platform, namely RA-FSD, aiming at real-time service provisioning and network utility maximization (NUM) of the underlying IoT resources based on the newly emerged fog computing paradigm. The platform leverages fog nodes as either fog service provider to offer timely services for end users, or service intermediaries to help track network conditions and mitigate communication overhead. By doing so, service consumers would always benefit from the fact that services produced by IoT applications are in their proximity and thus delivered to destination in a prompt manner. A service rate-adaptive algorithm is also developed as the key component of the RA-FSD platform to handle the abrupt changes happened in IoT network, dynamically adjust service delivery rate based on the network condition while retaining satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) to each service consumer, and support both elastic and inelastic network services from heterogeneous IoT applications.