A cost-efficient IoT service placement approach using whale optimization algorithm in fog computing environment

Abstract

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT)-based applications and the era of 5G networks has led to an exponential increase in the amount of data required for processing the IoT services. The fog computing paradigm has emerged as a distributed computing solution for serving these applications using available fog nodes near the IoT devices. Since the IoT applications are developed in the form of several IoT services with various quality of service (QoS) requirements that can be deployed on the fog nodes with different resource capabilities in the fog ecosystem, finding an efficient service placement plan is one of the challenging issues to be considered. In this paper, we propose an efficient IoT service placement solution based on the autonomic methodology for deploying IoT applications on the fog infrastructure. Our proposed solution monitors the QoS requirements of IoT services and capabilities of available fog nodes to determine an efficient service placement plan using the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) meta-heuristic technique. Besides, our evolutionary-based mechanism utilized the throughput and the energy consumption as objective functions for finding desirable IoT service placement plan while meeting the QoS requirements of each IoT service. Also, we develop an autonomous service placement framework according to a three-tier architecture of the fog ecosystem to show the interaction between the main components of the IoT device and fog layers for deploying IoT applications. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution increases the resource usage and service acceptance ratio and reduces the service delay and the energy consumption compared with the other metaheuristic-based mechanisms.