Towards a Fog-to-Cloud control topology for QoS-aware end-to-end communication

The recent deployment of novel network concepts, such as M2M communication or IoT, has undoubtedly stimulated the placement of a new set of services, leveraging both centralized resources in Cloud Data Centers and distributed resources shared by devices at the edge of the network. Moreover, Fog Computing has been recently proposed having as one of its main assets the reduction of service response time, further enabling the deployment of real-time services. Albeit QoS-aware network researches have been originally focused on data plane issues, the successful deployment of real-time services, demanding very low delay on the allocation of distributed resources, depends on the assessment of the impact of controlling decisions on QoS. Recently, Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) computing has been proposed as a hierarchical layered-architecture relying on a coordinated and distributed management of both Fog and Cloud resources, enabling the distributed and parallel allocation of resources at distinct layers, thus suitably mapping services demands into resources availability. In this paper, we assess the layered management architecture in F2C systems, taking into account its distributed nature. Preliminary results show the tradeoff observed regarding controllers capacity, number of controllers, and number of controller layers in the F2C architecture.