Efficient Application Deployment in Fog-enabled Infrastructures

Abstract

Fog computing is a paradigm that extends cloud computing services to the edge of the network in order to support delay-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) services. One of the most promising use-cases of fog computing is Smart City scenarios. Fog computing can substantially improve the quality of citywide services by reducing response delays. Owing to geographically distributed and resource-constrained fog nodes and a multitude of IoT devices in Smart Cities, efficient service deployment and end device traffic routing are quite challenging. Therefore, in this paper, we present an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for the Joint Application Component Placement and Traffic Routing (JAcPTR) problem in which users’ delay requirements and the limited traffic processing capacity of application instances are considered. Besides, the JAcPTR enables users and infrastructure managers to easily enforce their locality and management requirements in the deployment of application instances. To cope with the considerably high execution time in large instances of the JAcPTR problem, we propose a fast polynomial-time heuristic to efficiently solve the problem. The performance of the proposed heuristic has been evaluated through extensive simulation. Results show that in large instances of the problem, while the state-of-the-art Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solver fails to obtain a solution in 50% of the simulation runs in 300 seconds, our proposed heuristic can obtain a near-optimal solution in less than one second.