EmuFog: Extensible and scalable emulation of large-scale fog computing infrastructures

The diversity of Fog Computing deployment models and the lack of publicly available Fog infrastructure makes the design of an efficient application or resource management policy a challenging task. Such research often requires a test framework that facilitates the experimental evaluation of an application or protocol design in a repeatable and controllable manner. In this paper, we present EmuFog — an extensible emulation framework tailored for Fog computing scenarios — that enables the from-scratch design of Fog Computing infrastructures and the emulation of real applications and workloads. EmuFog enables researchers to design the network topology according to the use-case, embed Fog Computing nodes in the topology and run Docker-based applications on those nodes connected by an emulated network. Each of the sub-modules of Emu Fog are easily extensible, although EmuFog provides a default implementation for each of them. The scalability and efficacy of EmuFog are evaluated both on synthetic and real-world network topologies.