Design of Resource-Aware Load Allocation for Heterogeneous Fog Computing Environments

Abstract

The architecture employed by most of the researchers for the deployment of latency-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications is fog computing. Fog computing architecture offers less delay as compared to the cloud computing paradigm by providing resource constraint fog devices close to the edge of the network. Fog nodes process the incoming data by utilizing available resources which reduces the volume of data to be sent to the cloud server. Fog devices having dissimilar processing capabilities are present in a system. The connection of suitable sensor nodes to the parent fog node plays an essential role in achieving the optimum performance of the system. In this paper, we have designed an algorithm that dynamically assigns appropriate sensor devices to fog nodes to achieve a reduction in network utilization and latency. The proposed algorithm estimates the volume of information detected by an edge device from the rate of sensing frequency of the sensor attached to the edge device. The proposed policy while connecting the network nodes takes into account the heterogeneity and processing capability of the devices. Several evaluations are performed on multiple scales for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm. The outcomes of the evaluations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in achieving a reduction in network consumption and end-to-end delay.