Fractus: Orchestration of Distributed Applications in the Drone-Edge-Cloud Continuum

Next-generation drone applications will be distributed, including tasks that need to run at the edge or in the cloud and interact with the drone in a smooth way. In this paper, we propose Fractus, an orchestration framework for the automated deployment of such applications in the drone-edge-cloud continuum. Fractus provides users with abstractions for describing the application's placement and communication requirements, allocates resources in a mission-aware fashion by considering the drone operation area, establishes and maintains connectivity between components by transparently leveraging different networking capabilities, and tackles safety and privacy issues via policy-based access to mobility and sensor resources. We present the design of Fractus and discuss an implementation based on mature software deployment technology. Further, we evaluate the resource requirements of our implementation, showing that it introduces an acceptable overhead, and illustrate its functionality via real field tests and a simulation setup.