Capacity Planning of Fog Computing Infrastructures for Smart Monitoring

Fog Computing (FC) systems represent a novel and promising generation of computing systems aiming at moving storage and computation close to end-devices so as to reduce latency, bandwidth and energy-efficiency. Despite their gaining importance, the literature about capacity planning studies for FC systems is very limited only considering very simplified technological cases. This paper considers a model for the capacity planning of a FC system for smart monitoring applications. More specifically, this paper considers a FC-based rock collapse forecasting system based on a hybrid wired-wireless architecture deployed in the Swiss-Italian Alps. The system is composed by sensing units deployed on rock faces to gather environmental data and FC-units providing high-performance computing for smart monitoring purposes. Capacity planning studies will be designed for this FC-based system as well as for extensions of the original system (by varying the number of sensing units, sampling rates, the number of FC-units, the Radio Bandwidth and the Cloud capacity). The proposed multi-formalism model for capacity planning is based on the integrated use of Queuing Networks and Petri Nets. Some preliminary results concerning the potential use of the proposed model are described and commented.