Efficient management of resources in Cloud/Fog computing environments

The explosion of end user devices connected to the Internet experienced in the last few years has motivated the necessity to move computing and storage closer to them. This fact has led to coining the paradigm of fog computing. Fog computing, and the likes such as edge or mist computing, allows for bandwidth savings and reducing latencies to/from the cloud, and can be used as an extension of the cloud for a wide range of latency-sensitive applications. Thus, fog computing can be described as an intermediate layer between end user devices and the cloud.

There are different strategies to implement this layer, from integrating computing capabilities within network equipment to establish micro-datacenters close to the things, or to harness low-cost devices such as Single-Board Computers (SBC) (e.g. Raspberry Pi). In any case, there is usually limited storage and computing capabilities, especially when compared to the virtually infinite resource availability of cloud platforms. Also, different applications with different requirements will coexist. Each of these applications should be isolated from the others for security reasons but also to provide them with their required Quality of Service (QoS). Light virtualization technologies such as containers can be harnessed to this end. As a result, orchestration to track and manage the life cycle of containers becomes a key element within the fog layer. Previous work of the people involved in this research topic on resource management in Grids and Cloud environments has evolved into the current research efforts in fog environments. Strategies such as reservation in advance, predictions and estimations on system performance are harnessed to achieve the pursued goals.  Moreover, the research team addresses the management of decentralized fog systems based on the use of blockchain technology to make the system more resilient to failures and attacks.

Topics:

Relevant Publications:

• Carlos Núñez-Gómez; Martijn de Vos;  Jeremie Decouchant; Johan Pouwelse; Blanca Caminero; Carmen Carrión. Light-Hidra: Scalable and Decentralized Resource Orchestration in Fog-Iot Environments. https://doi.org/10.2139%2Fssrn.4594430
• Alcaide, Ángel F. and Núñez-Gómez, Carlos and Delicado, Francisco M. and Carrión, Carmen and Caminero, Maria Blanca. A Blockchain-Based e-Government Service for Quantity Surveyors. IT Professional, v.25, n.4,jul 2023 pg. 61-66  ISSN 1941-045X. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MITP.2023.3268567.
• Carmen Carrión. Research streams and open challenges in the metaverse. The Journal of Supercomputing v.80 n.2 , jul 2023, pg.1598-1639 ISSN 1573-0484. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11227-023-05544-1.
• María Isabel Ortiz-Lizcano, Enrique Arias-Antunez, Ángel Hernández Bravo, María Blanca Caminero, Tomás Rojo Guillen, Syong Hyun Nam Cha. Increasing the security and traceability of biological samples in biobanks by blockchain technology. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, v 231, 2023,107379, ISSN 0169-2607. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpb.2023.107379.
• Carlos Núñez-Gómez and Carmen Carrión and Blanca Caminero and Francisco M. Delicado. S-HIDRA: A blockchain and SDN domain-based architecture to orchestrate fog computing environments. Computer Networks,  Feb 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.comnet.2022.109512.
• Carmen Carrión. Kubernetes as a Standard Container Orchestrator – A Bibliometric Analysis. Journal of Grid Computing, v.20, n.4  dec 2022, ISSN 1572-9184. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10723-022-09629-8.
• Miguel Sánchez-de la Rosa and Carlos Núñes-Gómez and M. Blanca Caminero and Carmen Carrión. Exploring the use of blockchain in resource-constrained fog computing environments. Software: Practice and Experience, nov 2022,. https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fspe.3173.
• Carmen Carrión. Kubernetes Scheduling: Taxonomy, Ongoing Issues and Challenges. ACM Computer Survey, May 2022, ISSN 0360-0300. https://doi.org/10.1145/3539606.
• Carlos Núñez-Gómez; Blanca Caminero; Carmen Carrión. HIDRA: A Distributed Blockchain-Based Architecture for Fog/Edge Computing Environments. IEEE Access. 9, pp. 75231 – 75251. IEEE, 2021. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3082197
• Giovanny Mondragón-Ruiz, Alonso Tenorio-Trigoso, Manuel Castillo-Cara, M. Blanca Caminero, M. Carmen Carrión. An Experimental Study of Fog and Cloud Computing in CEP-based Real-Time IoT Applications. Journal of Cloud Computing-Advances Systems and Applications. 10 – 1, pp. 1 – 17. Springer Open,  jun 2021. DOI = 10.1186/s13677-021-00245-7.
• Alonso Tenorio, Manuel Castillo-Cara, M. Blanca Caminero, M. Carmen Carrión. An Analysis of Computational Resources of Event-Driven Streaming Data Flow for Internet of Things: A case study. The Computer Journal. 2021. DOI= 10.1093/comjnl/bxab143

Relevant Projects:

• Techniques to improve the architecture of servers, applications and services.
  We develop research on chip-multicore architecture and on-chip networks, aiming at increasing performance, reducing power consumption, increasing reliability by means of providing fault-tolerance support, increasing flexibility through virtualization techniques, and reducing silicon area.
• Enhancement of the architecture of servers, services and applications.TIN2012-38341-C04-04 (MINECO). 2013-2016.

PhD Thesis:

• Julio Proaño, “Proposals for Efficient Management of FPGAs within Cloud Computing Environments”, May 2017.
• Francisco J. Conejero, “QoS improvement within distributed environments through the use of SLAs”, October 2014.
• Luis Tomás, “Improving Quality of Service in Grids Through Meta-Scheduling in Advance”, February 2012.
• Agustín C. Caminero, “Proposals for Enhancing the Provision of Quality of Service in Grids”, May 2009.

People:

	Carmen Carrión, PhD Associate Professor Phone number: +34 967 592 00 – Ext. 2414 Email: carmen.carrion@uclm.es
	Mª Blanca Caminero, PhD Associate Professor Phone number: +34 967 592 00 – Ext. 2411 Email: mariablanca.caminero@uclm.es   Personal web: blog.uclm.es/mariablancacaminero
	Carlos Núñez Gómez PhD student Email: Carlos.Nunez@uclm.es Research: Blockchain technologies in Fog Computing environments
	Víctor Hidalgo Izquierdo MC student Email: Victor.Hidalgo3@alu.uclm.es Research: Efficient management of resources in Cloud/Fog computing environments