Breaking the Edge -- A Journey Through Cloud, Edge and Fog Computing

Advanced Technology Office
28 rue Jean Rostand
91400, Orsay
France
Angelo Corsaro, PhD
Chief Technology Officer
ADLINK Tech. Inc.
angelo.corsaro@adlinktech.com
AT()
BREAKING the EdgeA Journey Through Cloud, Edge and Fog Computing

State of Practice
Innovating Together

Hardware Tiers in IoT
A generic IoT/IIoT system has three
different hardware tiers
Off-premises data-centre which
may be private or public
On-premises edge infrastructure
Things with computational,
communication and storage
capacity

Hardware Tiers in IoT
The key architectural variations
that are discussed today all
depends on the bias, or lack
of thereof, on a speciﬁc tier

Cloud Centric Architectures
The majority of IoT (and
Telco infrastructures)
systems are today cloud-
centric
These systems are
characterised by device-
to-cloud communication
and in-cloud analytics

Cloud Centric Perspective
The IoT application is
deployed, managed
and monitored using
the Cloud IaaS
infrastructure

Cloud-Centric Perspective
The early days of IoT/IIoT have been
biased by a cloud centric
perspective
The cloud infrastructure is mature
and operationally convenient…
Yet cloud centric architectures
don’t ﬁt well for a large class of
IoT/IIoT applications

Cloud Centric
Architectures
Challenges

Cloud Computing
There is sufﬁcient
bandwidth to push data to
the Cloud.
Assumption #1

This slides have been crafted by Angelo Corsaro
Any use of these slides that does include me as Author/Co-Author is plagiary
Smart Factory
0.5 TB of data
produced per
day

Cloud Computing
Connectivity is not an
issue. A device will (almost)
always be connected to the
cloud.
Assumption #2

Searching Operator…

Cloud Computing
The latency induced by
cloud-centralised analytics
and control is compatible
with the system’s dynamic
Assumption #3

Autonomous
Vehicles
coordination of fast
moving autonomous
vehicles
intermittent
connectivity
dynamic pairing of
devices

Cloud Computing
The connectivity cost is
negligible
Assumption #4

Cost of connectivity is an
issue in Smart Grids as
the operator has to pay for
the 2G/3G/4G data-link

Cloud Computing
Companies are
comfortable with exposing
their data to the cloud.
Assumption #5

Edge-Centric Perspective
The main idea of Edge-
Centric architecture is that of
providing edge-clouds to
reduce some of the short-
comings of traditional Cloud
Centric architectures

Edge-Centric Perspective
The application is
deployed, managed
and monitored using
the Cloud IaaS
infrastructure which
cooperates with edge
Cloud infra.

The Fuzzy Edge
The edge is an extremely fuzzy concept as it depends
entirely from infrastructure ownership structure and
application domain.
What’s the edge in the image below?
MEC
InfraNet-Core
EDGE
Infra
Things, Machines,
User Terminal, …

To edge, or not to edge: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous boundaries,
Or to take arms against a sea of edges,
And by opposing end them?

Cloud, Edge, and Things
Cloud Computing gives operationally convenient abstractions
and tools to manage and provision data-centre resources
Edge Computing alleviates some of the challenges posed by
cloud computing at the cost of introducing some fragmentation
in the infrastructure.
But how about the Things? In a large class of system we need to
manage and provision them too…

What’s Really Needed?
A scalable, location
transparent, data-
centric layer that allows
us to effectively get the
data where needed
while minimising
resource usage
1

A geo-distributed, location
transparent, storage
infrastructure that allows
us to store data where it
makes sense to support
local computing while
maintaining location
transparent access to it.
2
Home/Building Management – Edge Computing
As we tackle the problem,
it would also make sense
to address edge
computing and ensure
that our solution will allow
for location transparent
and uniform access to
data even if that is living
on the edge.

3
An infrastructure that
allows us to federate
compute, storage, I/O
and communication
resources regardless of
their location (Fog
Infrastructure)

Internet protocol
For historical reasons, internet has
been built on a host-centric
communication model.
(machine-to-machine)

The Internet today
Most of the application on the
internet today are data / content
centric.
What matters to the user is the
data not as much who has it…

Internet protocol
The internet protocol is inherently
one-to-one. Broadcast and multicast
communications are not viable in wide
networks.
Thus the diffusion of the same data to
multiple consumers is very inefﬁcient.

NDN / CCN
NDN is based on a data centric
networking paradigm.
Data samples are identiﬁed with
hierarchical names.
NDN is Inherently Pull and best suited
for static data.
Named Data Networking
Content Centric Networking
/com.adlink/fr/employees/olivier.hecart

DDS is a great data centric technology which embraces powerful concepts
like strong decoupling between publishers and subscribers.
But DDS has been designed for small to medium systems and suffers from
major scalability issues on larger systems.
It is push based which makes uneasy to retrieve speciﬁc data or to properly
ﬁlter data streams.
Data Distribution Service

The Internet of Tomorrow
With the raise of IoT, the
different devices connected to
the internet use very
heterogeneous networking
technologies (TCP/IP, BLE, 3G,
6LowPan, …).
Some endpoints are
extremely constrained w.r.t
computational, communication
resources as well as energy.

Internet scale data-centric protocol that
unifies data-sharing between any kind of
device including those constrained with
respect to the node resources, such as
computational resources and power, as well
as the network.

Conceptual Model
zenoh provides a data-centric
abstraction in which applications
can read and write data
autonomously and
asynchronously.
The data read and written by
zenoh applications is associated
with one or more resources
identiﬁed by a URI.
DDS Global Data Space
...
Data
Writer
Data
Writer
Data
Writer
Data
Reader
Data
Reader
Data
Reader
Data
Reader
Data
Writer
R1
R2
R i
Rn
-- These are Resources
/myhouse/floor/1/musicroom/LightStatus
/myhouse/floor/2/musicroom/LightStatus
/myhouse/floor/2/bedroom/erik/LightStatus
-- These are Selections
/myhouse/floor/2/bedroom/*/LightStatus
/myhouse/**/LightStatus
/myhouse/**

Conceptual Model
Data can be pushed to
subscribers and storages
and be queried from
storages.
zenoh
pub/sub protocol (push)
storage/query protocol (pull)
Publisher SubscriberStorage
write / stream subscribestore query

Conceptual Model
Data can be pushed-to,
pulled or queried-from
applications periodically
or asynchronously.

Routing
Adaptative,
fault tolerant,
brokering and routing.

Reliability & Ordering
Z1
Z2
Z6
Z3
Z5
Z4A1 A2
application-to-application reliability
first-to-last-broker
Zenoh supports 3 levels of reliability :
• Hop to hop reliability.
Ensures reliability and ordering
when NO failures.
• App-to-app reliability.
• First-to-last-broker reliability.
More scalable than app-to-app
reliability.

Zenoh clients
• Low footprint C client
• OCaml client
• Python client
• Bash client

A piece of code
Publisher :
z = zenoh.connect('127.0.0.1:7447')
pub = z.declare_publisher('/demo/hello')
pub.write('Hello world'.encode())
Subscriber :
z = zenoh.connect('127.0.0.1:7447')
z.declare_subscriber(‘/demo/**', lambda rid, data:
print('received {}'.format(data.tobytes().decode())))

Throughput
0
2500
5000
7500
10000
8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048 4096 8192 16384
zenoh Cyclone DDS
Mbps

Key Highlights
Extremely Resource
Constrained Environments
Defined the most wire/power/memory efficient
protocol in the market to provide connectivity
to extremely constrained targets
Support for:
- Peer-to-peer and brokered communication
- Batched data and deltas
- Ordered reliability and fragmentation
- Queries
zenoh
zenoh
6LowPAN
802.15.4
BLE
2G/3G/
LTE
Unspeciﬁed API
App App App
…
Application
TCP UDP
IP

Key Highlights
Protocol implementation for a
8-bit micro-controllers takes
300 Bytes of RAM and has
wire-overhead of 4 bytes for
data samples
7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|R|S|P| SDATA |
+---------------+
~ SN ~
+---------------+
~ RID | SID ~
+---------------+
~ PRID ~
+---------------+
~ [Payload] ~
+---------------+

Home/Building Management
Imagine that we have a collection
of houses in a residence or
equivalently buildings on a business
park that we would like to monitor
and manage.
In other terms, we would like to
read, write and observe data
specic to the house/building.
More importantly we would want
to do this from anywhere.
//residence-1/house-1/kitchen/airquality
//residence-1/house-1/alert
//residence-1/house-1/utilities/electricity
//residence-1/house-1/laundry/washer/schedule
//residence-1/house-n/kitchen/airquality
//residence-1/house-n/alert
//residence-1/house-n/utilities/electricity
//residence-1/house-n/laundry/washer/schedule
...

Cloud Centric Home/Building Management
One solution is to push the data to
the Cloud
Applications can use the cloud as
the place to go and get or set any
information concerning our
house/buildings.
That is a very commont approach...
But, is this a solution to the
problem, or is it just delaying the
problem?
//residence-1/house-i/kitchen/airquality
//residence-1/house-i/alert
//residence-1/house-i/utilities/electricity
//residence-1/house-i/laundry/washer/schedule

Scaling Out
At some point scaling-up
won’t be a solution and we
will have to scale-out and
leverage multiple cloud
regions.
With multiple cloud
regions the unifed view of
the system is lost, and we
are back to the starting
point.

Home/Building Management – Edge Computing
As we tackle the problem,
it would also make sense
to address edge
computing and ensure
that our solution will allow
for location transparent
and uniform access to
data even if that is living
on the edge.

YAKS provides a distributed
service that implements an
eventually consistent, scalable,
location transparent, high
performance, and distributed
key/value store with pluggable
back-ends and front-end.
YAKS is equipped with dynamic
discovery and supports extremely
well dynamic environments
YAKS data is globally accessible
without requiring local
replication as in traditional key/
value stores.

Home/Building Management with YAKS
Regardless of wether data
is the device, the edge
infrastructure or the cloud,
YAKS provides location
transparent access
through a distributed
key-value store
abstraction.
All the details concerning
how to get the data from
were it is to were it needs
to are handled by YAKS.

YAKS Architecture
YAKS has a modular
architecture relying
on different kinds of
plugins
Engine
AccessControl
Crypto
Authetication
DBMS
…
Memory
Socket
…
REST
zenoh
Security Plugin
Backend Plugin
Transport Plugin
Frontend Plugin
GPS
Clock
Logical
C/C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
…
API

Deployment Topology
zenoh
zenoh
zenoh
zenoh
zenoh
zenoh routing infrastructure
zenoh

YAKS
YAKS is a distributed service to deﬁne, manage and
operate on key/value spaces
The key abstractions at the core of yaks are Path, Value,
Selector, Storage, Workspace, and Admin Space

YAKS Values
A YAKS Value is deﬁned by the following tuple:
v = e, c, t
Where e is the encoding and c represents the content and t
is a logical timestamp used for ordering.

YAKS Path
A Path in YAKS is a string having the following format:
/s1/s2/…/sn
Where si does not contain wildcard characters such as ‘*’
and ‘**’
Example:
/com/adlink/factory/shanghai/line/1/machine/
/net/icorsaro/home/livingroom/lightbulb/10

YAKS Selector
A Selector in YAKS is the conjunction of an expression identifying a set of keys and
optionally a predicate on values
/se1/se2/…/sen [? [predicate] [(properties)]] [#projection]
Where:
• sei may contain wildcard characters such as ‘*’ and ‘**’
• the predicate has the form: f1 op v1 f2 op v2… fn op vn  
(where op can be , =, =, =, and !=)
• the properties is a semicolon separated list of key=value
• the projection is a semicolon separated list of ﬁelds to project.
Example:
/net/icorsaro/home/*/lightbulb?luminosity50#id
/net/icorsaro/home/*/consumption/statistics?(start=yesterday;end=now)#average;std

Selector / Path matching
‘*’ to match 1 segment (full or partial):
Examples:
/home/bob/*/light
/home/bob/room*/light
/home/bob/*/light
matches
matches
doesn’t match
/home/bob/kitchen/light
/home/bob/room1/light
/home/bob/floor1/room2/light
Examples:
/home/bob/**/light
/home/bob/**
matches
also matches
/home/bob/kitchen/light
/home/bob/floor1/room2/light
/home/bob/floor2/room1/temp
‘**’ to match several segments (full):

YAKS Storage
A Storage in YAKS is deﬁned by means of a selector s and
backend B. Where the back-end B may be one of
supported backends, such as main-memory, DBMS, etc.
A Storage with selector s will store path,value for which s
matches the path.

KV Space Operations
YAKS primitives to operate on the key/value space are:
• put, update, remove, get
• subscribe/unsubscribe
• register_eval/unregister_eval, eval

Put/Get
put
Data are published via
put/update.
Matching storages
receive and store the
data.
Later on, applications
can query the data

Put/Get
get
put/update.
Matching storages
receive and store the
data.
Later on, applications
can query the data
get

Subscriptions
subscribe
put
subscribe
put/update.
Yaks routes the
publications to all
matching subscribers.

Evals
register_eval
eval
Any application can
bind a computation
with a path.
Applications can trigger
the execution of these
functions by evaluating
the path.

Key Primitives
class Workspace(object):
def put(self, path, value)
def update(self, path, value)
def remove(self, path)
def get(self, selector)
def subscribe(self, selector, listener)
def unsubscribe(self, subscription_id)
def register_eval(self, path, callback)
def unregister_eval(self, path)
def eval(self, selector)

Play with it….
us-west.yaks.is 
/demo/uswc/**
us-east.yaks.is 
/demo/us-east/**
eu-central.yaks.is 
/demo/eu/**
ap-southeast.yaks.is
/demo/ap/**
Example:
• Put data: curl -X PUT -d 'Hello World!' http://us-west.yaks.is:8000/demo/eu/test
• Get data: curl http://ap-southeast.yaks.is:8000/demo/*/test

Vision
fogOS aims at providing a
decentralised infrastructure for
provisioning and managing (1)
compute, (2) storage, (3)
communication and (3) I/O resources
available anywhere across the network.
fogOS addresses highly
heterogeneous systems even those with
extremely resource-constrained nodes.

— Decentralised Design
fogOS can manage and
provision any network
connected device on which it
agent is running
Its decentralised architecture
allows to manage the system
from anywhere and does not
need any speciﬁc set of nodes
running as “servers”

Modules
Fog Infrastructure Manager
Virtualises the hardware infrastructure, such
as computational, communication, storage
and I/O resources, and abstract the key
primitives provided by system software, such
as the OS
Provides primitives for managing these
virtualised infrastructure
Provides infrastructure level monitoring
information.
Fog Atomic Entity Manager
(FAEM)
Fog Entity Orchestrator
(FIM)

Modules
Manages the Fog Atomic Entity (FAE) life-cycle and
maps then into FDU to be deployed by the FIM.
Triggers the FAE speciﬁc monitoring plug-ins in
response to relevant events such as migration, failure,
etc.
This information may be used by the Fog Entity
Orchestrator (FEO) to trigger re-allocation, restart, etc.  
The main abstraction provided by the FAEM is the Fog
Atomic Entity
(FAEM)
(FIM)

Modules
Validates the entity specification
Decides based on available resources and entity
constraints if it can be accepted.
Device an allocation of the entity that optimises
resource utilisation while satisfying the entity’s
functional and non-functional requirements
Executes the allocation by proper coordination with
the FAEM and FIM
Continuously monitors and reconfigures entity
allocation to ensure that the constraints are satisfied.
(FAEM)
(FIM)

Entity
An entity fragment is directed
acyclic graph of atomic entities.  
An entity is a directed acyclic
graph of atomic entities and
entity fragments.  
VM
C
UK C
BE UK
VM: Virtual Machine
C: Container
UK: Uni Kernel
BE: Binary Executable
uS: micro Service
uS
BE
UKUK

AT()
Information Model
fogOS’s information model
deﬁnes the describes associated
with nodes, entities and
networks.
Additionally it provides an
abstract way to describe
applications and relations
between them.
It is implemented as a set of
YANG Models.

AT()
Relation with ETSI NFV and MEC IM
fogOS information model is a
super-set of the ETSI (European
Telecommunications Standards
Institute) MEC and ETSI NFV
Speciﬁcally, fogOS supports the
declaration of I/O constraints.
YANG models have also been
deﬁned for fogOS abstractions.

Architecture
fogOS is composed by:
NDN. At its lowest level, it leverages a Named Data
Network (NDN) infrastructure based on zenoh. DDS can
also be used as a transport — not necessarily an NDN
YAKS. A distributed key-value store that leverages the
NDN for scalability
Agent. The core logic of fogOS, it takes care of managing,
monitoring and orchestrating entities through plugins
Plugins. Plugins provide supports for atomic entities, OS,
networks, etc.
zenoh
YAKS
AgentPlugins
Network
Data Link
Physical
Transport

AT()
Plugins
fog 5 leverages plugins interact and manage:
Atomic Entities (Runtimes)
Networks
OSes
Monitoring
Resource Orchestration
Resource Management
For each type of plugin an interface has been deﬁned.
For instance, plugins that manage atomic entities have
to implement the FSM for the kind of atomic entity
they will be managing.
zenoh
YAKS
AgentPlugins
Network
Data Link
Physical
Transport

Local/Global and Actual/Desired
fogOS uses YAKS to maintain
the actual and desired state
for global and node-speciﬁc
information
This separation ensures that
there is never write
concurrency on the actual
state and that the evolution is
entirely under the control of
the agent
Desired
Global Store
Actual
Global Store
Actual
node-local Store
Desired
node-local Store
AgentWorld
Actual
node-local
Constraint Store
Desired
node-local Constraint
Store
Plug-in 1
Plug-in 2
Plug-in N
Normal Node
MCU
MCU
MCU
Desired
Global Store
Actual
Global Store
Actual
node-local Store
Desired
node-local Store
Agent Plug-insWorld

AT()
Interact with fogOS
To interact with fogOS we provide a set
of API for Python3.
These API uses interact with fogOS
using the distributed data store.
The demo that we show uses this API.
API Docs: https://atolab.github.io/fog05-
doc/fog05.html#module-fog05.api

— The Eclipse Project
Since
June 2018

OpenFog and 5GPPP
fogOS is one of the infrastructure
identiﬁed as compliant with the 5G
principles and requirements by the EU
5GPPP working group
fogOS architecture is compatible with the
OpenFog Reference Architecture.
Additionally fogOS is used as the
reference fog platform in several test-beds

Users and Press
Mm2
Multi-access edge
platform manager - NFV
(MEPM-V)
MEAO
fog05
+
MEPM-V plugin
5GCity Components
ETSI NFV Components
ETSI MEC Components
Multilayer Orchestrator
Operation Support System
Os-Ma-nfvo
NFVO
VNFM
(ME app
LCM)
VNFM
(ME
platform
LCM)
Virtualisation Infrastructure Manager
Multi-access
edge
platform
(VNF)
NFVI
Data plane
(VFN/PNF)
Os-Ma-nfvo
Me app
(VNF)
Service
Mm5
Mp1
Mp2
Or-Vnfm
Or-Vi
Ve-Vnfm-vnf
Nf-Vi
Nf-Vn
Nf-Vn
Ve-Vnfm-em
Vi-Vnfm = Mm6
Mv3
Mv2
Mv1
ETSI NFV Reference points
ETSI MEC Reference points
ETSI NFV-MEC Reference points
• Mv1 ~ Os-Ma-nfvo
• Mv2 ~ Ve-Vnfm-em
• Mv3 ~ Ve-Vnfm-vnf
Mm3*
Mm1
fog05
+
MEAO plugin

Key Takeaways
Cloud Computing is operationally convenient but it has
several limitations that limit its applicability in a large class of
applications.
1

Key Takeaways
The Edge is fuzzy in essence and limiting by nature. We
should focus on infrastructure that allows to unify the
computational, communication, communication and I/O
resources end-to-end
2

Key Takeaways
The world outside of the data-center is constrained,
heterogeneous, and tricky. Yet, that’s the place where the
difference can be made.
3

Angelo Corsaro, PhD
Chief Technology Officer
ADLINK Tech. Inc.
angelo.corsaro@adlinktech.com
Innovating Together

Breaking the Edge -- A Journey Through Cloud, Edge and Fog Computing

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Breaking the Edge -- A Journey Through Cloud, Edge and Fog Computing