Modeling and Emulation of an Osmotic Computing Ecosystem using OsmoticToolkit

Abstract

Digital services are increasingly becoming cyber-physical and osmotic, combining Cloud resources with Fog, Edge, and IoT devices. This trend can be observed in the e-health domain or in smart city applications where the location of software deployments and data processing matters. Before such applications go live, careful planning with real system emulation is necessary. We claim that the OsmoticToolkit, although in the early stages, is the first emulation environment designed to address this challenge. In this paper, we introduce the emulator’s functionalities and validate experimentally with an e-health scenario, using a reference deployment of a microservice-based hospital application. The experimental results carried out show its effectiveness providing valuable support for understanding the impact on resources, workloads, and Quality of Service requirements within Cloud-Edge/Fog-IoT scenarios while preserving the users’ Service Level Agreements (SLAs).