Fog at the Edge: Experiences Building an Edge Computing Platform

Abstract

Technology advancement has pushed computation to the network edge, paving the way for a class of IoT applications that leverage CPU, storage and communications in edge devices. Building these new IoT applications is not an easy task however. Two key challenges are supporting the dynamic nature of the edge network and the context-dependent characteristics of application logic. In this paper we report our experience in building an edge computing platform called Distributed Node-RED (DNR) that uses a distributed data flow programming model based on the popular open source Node-RED tool. We describe some of the challenges we faced as well as some novel solutions that were implemented in our platform. A new approach in applying the concept of exogenous coordination is also presented and shown to be necessary in building large-scale IoT applications across the edge, fog and cloud.