S-HIDRA: a blockchain and SDN domain-based architecture to orchestrate fog computing environments

Fog computing arises as a complement to cloud computing where computing and storage are provided in a decentralized way rather than the centralized approach of the cloud paradigm. In addition, blockchain provides a decentralized and immutable ledger which can provide support for running arbitrary lo...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Núñez Gómez, Carlos, Carrión Espinosa, María del Carmen, Caminero Herráez, María Blanca, Delicado Martínez, Francisco Manuel
Format: article
Publication Date:2022
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
Repository:RUIdeRA. Repositorio Institucional de la UCLM
OAI Identifier:oai:ruidera.uclm.es:10578/36310
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2022.109512
https://hdl.handle.net/10578/36310
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Distributed systems
Software defined networking
Fog computing
Blockchain
Smart contracts
Resource orchestration
Description
Summary:Fog computing arises as a complement to cloud computing where computing and storage are provided in a decentralized way rather than the centralized approach of the cloud paradigm. In addition, blockchain provides a decentralized and immutable ledger which can provide support for running arbitrary logic thanks to smart contracts. These facts can lead to harness smart contracts on blockchain as the basis for a decentralized, autonomous, and resilient orchestrator for the resources in the fog. However, the potentially vast amount of geographically distributed fog nodes may threaten the feasibility of the orchestration. On the other hand, fog nodes can exhibit highly dynamic workloads which may result in the orchestrator redistributing the services among them. Thus, there is also a need to dynamically support the network connections to those services independently of their location. Software Defined Networking (SDN) can be integrated within the orchestrator to carry out a seamless service management. To tackle both aforementioned issues, the S-HIDRA architecture is proposed. It integrates SDN support within a blockchain-based orchestrator of container-based services for fog environments, in order to provide low network latency and high service availability. Also, a domain-based architecture is outlined as potential scenario to address the geographic distributed nature of fog environments. Results obtained from a proof-of-concept implementation assess the required functionality for S-HIDRA.