PTC: Pick-Test-Choose to Place Containerized Micro-Services in IoT

In the presence of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the end-users require a response within a short amount of time which the cloud computing alone cannot provide. Fog computing plays an important role in the presence of IoT devices in order to meet such delay requirements. Though beneficial in these latency-sensitive scenarios, the fog has several implementation challenges. In order to solve the problem of micro-service placement in the fog devices, we propose a framework with the objective of achieving low response time. This problem has been formulated as an optimization problem to improve the response time by considering the time-varying resource availability of the fog devices as constraints. We propose an orchestration framework named Pick-Test-Choose (PTC) to solve the problem. PTC uses Bayesian Optimization based iterative reinforcement learning algorithm to find out a micro-service allocation based on the current workload of the fog devices. PTC employs containers for service isolation and migration of the micro-services. The proposed architecture is implemented over an in-house testbed as well as in iFogSim simulator. The experimental results show that the proposed framework performs better in terms of response time compared to various other baselines.