Abstract
The fog computing model integrates cloud services into the network on a widely distributed level to overcome challengers of cloud-based IoT platforms. The deployment of IoT solutions employing a fog architecture requires a decentralized and scalable computing infrastructure, which places networking, compute and storage resources in a hierarchy of levels arranged between the data source and the cloud. Despite recent advances in fog platforms, there exists no readily available testbed which can help researchers to design and evaluate fog applications on a truly IoT scale. The current fog prototyping tools are adapted from cloud middleware or network simulators to enable the evaluation of fog solutions in limited environments. This paper presents a framework and toolset integration that uses the Fogbed emulator to enable fog distributed testbeds in virtualized environments. Unlike current approaches, the proposed framework allows for the deployment and testing of fog components in a scalable way. Its design is compatible with real world technologies and meets the requirements of low cost, flexible setup and supports third-party systems through standard interfaces. A case study is presented to demonstrate the emulation of fog distributed components and services using a cluster approach. In addition, future developments and research directions are discussed.