Cisco Supports Computer Science Project - A Fog Architecture

07-18-2013

Cisco Systems has awarded Professor Patrick Eugster, Dr. Kirill Kogan, and graduate students, Chamikara Jayalath and Julian Stephen, a gift of $98,987 in support of the "A Fog Architecture" project.

By striving for a seamless landscape between end hosts and cloud data centers, the fog paradigm has the potential to more efficiently deliver existing cloud-based services and enable new presently infeasible services.  However, to unleash this potential, research is required on various fronts. The specific aim of this project is to explore an architecture for delivering fog services, which includes several research components namely (a) introducing and analyzing new management, economical and behavioral models created by fog computing, (b) leveraging and extending software-defined networking for managing fog devices and resources, (c) proposing new models for resource management that can reuse fog/network/cloud infrastructure in the "best'' way according to objective functions, and (d) exploit recent advances on partial homomorphic encryption for ensuring privacy in decentralized computation at a low overhead.

Eugster says, "Cloud computing has marked an important paradigm shift towards efficiently offloading computation to a (single) third-party datacenter. The paradigm of fog computing is a more generic approach to implementing efficient distributed services in that it allows the network between clients and a cloud datacenter or several cloud datacenters to be involved in non-trivial data processing far beyond simple transmission. This holistic view allows for significant performance improvements, typically reduced latency, by processing data closer to its sources and sinks. This work seamlessly generalizes our previous efforts on Atmosphere, an approach to apply cloud computing technologies to setups where data is distributed across several datacenters."