Towards Programmable Fog Nodes in Smart Factories

Starting with the invention of the steam engine in the 18th century, the industrial revolutions formed an ecosystem of over 20 billion connected devices with unforeseeable influence to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Predictions are that, by 2020 the connectable assets will generate about 44 ZB of data, which pose interesting challenges related to privacy, connectivity, scalability and others. A current line of action is the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), which can be monitored and controlled by private clouds or edge systems. Our approach is to bring functionalities, such as analytics, as close to the devices as possible (denoted as Fog Computing) to reduce latency and enhance data privacy and communication robustness. As a starting point we're extending a standard-compliant Machine-To-Machine Communication (M2M) architecture with container based orchestration mechanisms to enable CPSs to be programmable, autonomous and to communicate peer-to-peer. As the main field of application we are considering in particular smart factory environments and Industrial Internet domains in general.