Sofa: A spark-oriented fog architecture

Fog computing offers a wide range of service levels including low bandwidth usage, low response time, support of heterogeneous applications, and high energy efficiency. Therefore, real-time embedded applications could potentially benefit from Fog infrastructure. However, providing high system utilization is an important challenge of Fog computing especially for processing embedded applications. In addition, although Fog computing extends cloud computing by providing more energy efficiency, it still suffers from remarkable energy consumption, which is a limitation for embedded systems. To overcome the above limitations, in this paper, we propose SoFA, a Spark-oriented Fog architecture that leverages Spark functionalities to provide higher system utilization, energy efficiency and scalability. Compared to the common Fog computing platforms where edge devices are only responsible for processing data received from their IoT nodes, SoFA leverages the remaining processing capacity of all other edge devices. To attain this purpose, SoFA provides a distributed processing paradigm by the help of Spark to utilize the whole processing capacity of all the available edge devices leading to increase energy efficiency and system utilization. In other words, SoFA proposes a near-sensor processing solution in which the edge devices act as the Fog nodes. In addition, SoFA provides scalability by taking advantage of Spark functionalities. According to the experimental results, SoFA is a power-efficient and scalable solution desirable for embedded platforms by providing up to 3.1x energy efficiency for the Word-Count benchmark compared to the common Fog processing platform.