Data and computation movement in fog environments: The DITAS approach

Data-intensive applications are becoming very important in several domains including e-health, government 2.0, smart cities, and industry 4.0. In fact, the significant increase of sensor deployment in the Internet of things (IoT) environments, in conjunction with the huge amount of data that are generated by the smart and intelligent devices such as smartphones, requires proper data management. The goal of this chapter is to focus on how to improve data management when data are produced and consumed in a Fog Computing environment, where both resources at the edge of the network (e.g., sensors and mobile devices) and resources in the cloud (e.g., virtual machines) are involved and need to operate seamlessly together. Based on the approach proposed in the European DITAS project, data and computation movement between the edge and the cloud are studied, to create a balance between such characteristics as latency and response time (when data are stored in edge-located resources) and scalability and reliability in case of data residing in the cloud. In this contribution, to enable data and computation movement, an approach based on the principles of Service-Oriented Computing applied to a Fog environment has been adopted.