CEFIoT: A Fault-Tolerant IoT Architecture for Edge and Cloud

Internet of Things (IoT), the emerging computing infrastructure that refers to the networked interconnection of physical objects, incorporates a plethora of digital systems that are being developed by means of a large number of applications. Many of these applications administer data collection on the edge and offer data storage and analytics capabilities in the cloud. This raises the following problems: (i) the processing stages in IoT applications need to have separate implementations for both the edge and the cloud, (ii) the placement of computation is inflexible with separate software stacks, as the optimal deployment decisions need to be made at runtime, and (iii) unified fault tolerance is essential in case of intermittent long-distance network connectivity problems, malicious harming of edge devices, or harsh environments. This paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant architecture CEFIoT for IoT applications by adopting state-of-the-art cloud technologies and deploying them also for edge computing. We solve the data fault tolerance issue by exploiting the Apache Kafka publish/subscribe platform as the unified high-performance data replication solution offering a common software stack for both the edge and the cloud. We also deploy Kubernetes for fault-tolerant management and the advanced functionality allowing on-the-fly automatic reconfiguration of the processing pipeline to handle both hardware and network connectivity based failures.