Simulating FogDirector Application Management

Achieving a correct and effective management of Fog computing applications is a non-trivial task to accomplish, which includes considering specific application requirements as well as dynamic infrastructure characteristics. CISCO FogDirector is a tool that can be used to manage the entire life-cycle of IoT applications over Fog infrastructures by relying on a RESTful API. In this paper, we present a prototype simulation environment, FogDirSim, compliant with FogDirector API. FogDirSim permits comparing different application management policies according to a set of well-defined performance indicators (viz., uptime, energy consumption, resource usage, type of alerts) and by considering probabilistic variations of the applications workload and failures of the underlying infrastructure. A lifelike example is used to validate the prototype and to show its usefulness in selecting the best management policy.