Umar Ozeer - Autonomic Resilience of Distributed IoT Applications in the Fog

Recent computing trends have been advocating for more distributed paradigms, namely Fog computing, which extends the capacities of the Cloud at the edge of the network, that is close to end devices and end users in the physical world. The Fog is a key enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications as it resolves some of the needs that the Cloud fails to provide such as low network latencies, privacy, QoS, and geographical requirements. For this reason, the Fog has become increasingly popular and  finds application in many fields such as smart homes and cities, agriculture, healthcare, transportation, etc.
 
The Fog, however, is unstable because it is constituted of billions of heterogeneous devices in a dynamic ecosystem. IoT devices may regularly fail because of bulk production and cheap design. Moreover, the Fog-IoT ecosystem is cyber-physical and thus devices are subjected to external physical world conditions which increase the occurrence of failures. When failures occur in such an ecosystem, the resulting inconsistencies in the application affect the physical world by inducing hazardous and costly situations.
 
In this Thesis, we propose an end-to-end autonomic failure management approach for IoT applications deployed in the Fog. The proposed approach recovers from failures in a cyber-physical consistent way. Cyber-physical consistency aims at maintaining a consistent behavior of the application with respect to the physical world, as well as avoiding dangerous and costly circumstances.
 
The approach was validated using model checking techniques to verify important correctness properties. It was then implemented as a framework called F3ARIoT. This framework was evaluated on a smart home application. The results showed the feasibility of deploying F3ARIoT on real Fog-IoT applications as well as its good performances in regards to end user experience.