A systematic study of load balancing approaches in the fog computing environment

Abstract

Internet of Things has been growing, due to which the number of user requests on fog computing layer has also increased. Fog works in a real-time environment and offers from connected devices need to be processed immediately. With the increase in users requests on fog layer, virtual machines (VMs) at fog layer become overloaded. Load balancing mechanism can distribute load among all the VMs in equal proportion. It has become a necessity in the fog layer to equally, and equitably distribute all the workload among the existing VMs in the segment. Till now, many load balancing techniques have been proposed for fog computing. An empirical study of existing methods in load balancing have been conducted, and taxonomy has been presented in a hierarchical form. Besides, the article contains the year-wise comprehensive review and summary of research articles published in the area of load balancing from 2013 to 2020. Furthermore, article also contains our proposed fog computing architecture to resolve load balancing problem. It also covers current issues and challenges that can be resolved in future research works. The paper concludes by providing future directions.