Fog Orchestration for IoT Services: Issues, Challenges and Directions

Large-scale IoT services such as healthcare, smart cities and marine monitoring are pervasive in Cyber-physical environments strongly supported by Internet technologies and Fog computing. Complex IoT services are increasingly composed of sensors, devices, and compute resources within Fog computing infrastructures. The orchestration of such applications can be leveraged to alleviate the difficulties of maintenance and enhance data security and system reliability. However, how to efficiently deal with dynamic variations and transient operational behavior is a crucial challenge within the context of choreographing complex services. Furthermore, with the rapid increase of the scale of IoT deployments, the heterogeneity, dynamicity, and uncertainty within Fog environments and increased computational complexity further dramatically aggravate this challenge. This article provides an overview of the core issues, challenges and future research directions in Fog-enabled orchestration for IoT services. Additionally, we present early experiences of an orchestration scenario, demonstrating the feasibility and initial results of using a distributed genetic algorithm in this context.