IoT fault management in cloud/fog environments

Abstract

IoT has been promoting the view of sensors as smart objects capable of sensing data from the real world and interacting with other smart entities over the Internet. Software applications built over the IoT are usually designed to work at many different layers of the network, from the very "Edge" of it, i.e., close to sensors, up to the Cloud, or anywhere in between. In such a "Fog" context where the number of IoT devices continues to grow and the IoT business logic can be distributed in any computing element of the network, there is a strong need of automating the service provisioning activities in a way that a high QoS is ensured against potential faults, being the latter of hardware or software type. In this work we discuss the design of a fault management framework that strives to provide service continuity in IoT contexts by enforcing a strategy that hierarchically distributes the fault handling responsibilities to all the layers of the Fog where the IoT application resides.