A Decentralized Framework with Dynamic and Event-Driven Container Orchestration at the Edge

Virtualization provides an abstraction layer for the Internet of Things technology to tackle the heterogeneity of the edge networks. It enables the deployment of an application on devices with different architectures to achieve uniformity. This study lays down the fundamentals of a framework for dynamic and event-driven orchestration towards a fully decentralized edge. It provides a blockchain-based delivery platform for containerized applications registered with their resource requirements through a registry on a distributed file system, namely InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The decentralized resource manager running on the metrics scraped from the host and the virtualization platform, i.e., Docker in our implementation, dynamically optimizes the resources allocated to each container. The framework ensures that variable workloads of a heterogeneous environment can co-exist on multiple edge devices. An event-driven architecture is built over a lightweight messaging protocol, MQTT, capitalizing on the asynchronous and distributed nature of the publish/subscribe pattern to achieve a truly distributed system.