Business continuity of Cloud-based IoT applications through a seamless continuum

Abstract

IoT systems often exploit the Cloud to process and share collected data, while pre-processing at the Edge reduces the amount of data transferred to the network and processed in the Cloud. Despite the relevant advantages of using centralized and multiplexed high-performance resources, Edge-Cloud interactions might not be possible due to transient network failures, so negatively impacting business continuity. In this paper, we extend the adoption of Edge computing by seamlessly mirroring in Edge, through a framework, some Cloud-deployed components of the business logic and related data of IoT applications to improve service availability when transient network failures impede Edge-Cloud communication. In particular, to address potential inconsistency due to data replication among Edge nodes and Cloud, we propose a new distributed consistency algorithm, called EdgeCloudWPaxos. It is based on a distributed, event-driven technique that implements reconciliation when distributed local transactions occur. The paper presents the framework, its adoption for wrapping an existing application for item tracking, and the validation through several tests conducted by emulating the tracking activity produced by a number of retail shops, which shows the effectiveness of the framework in ensuring business continuity and lower response times even in the case of network failure.