Fog at the Edge:experiences building an Edge computing platform

Technology advancement has pushed computation to the network edge, paving the way for a class of IoT applications that leverage CPU, storage and communications in edge devices. Building these new IoT applications is not an easy task however. Two key challenges include: supporting the dynamic nature of the edge network and the context-dependent characteristics of application logic. In this paper we report our experience in building an edge computing platform that uses a distributed data flow programming model based on the popular open source Node-RED tool. We describe some of the challenges we faced as well as some novel solutions that were implemented in our platform. A new approach in applying the concept of exogenous coordination is also presented and shown to be necessary in building large scale IoT applications across the edge, fog and cloud