IoT application modules placement in heterogeneous fog–cloud infrastructure

Abstract

Due to the increasing demands of minimizing the delay for Internet of things (IoT) applications, cloud computing researchers are now moving towards the research in fog computing and edge computing area. Fog computing serves the purpose of bringing devices closer to the proximity of data centre by performing some specific possible tasks nearest to the vicinity of devices requiring the services and ultimately reduces the delay. Thus the complete infrastructure becomes combined fog–cloud in itself. Furthermore, Fog computing serves the need of running the IoT applications by placing the application modules on to the devices available in the said fog–cloud infrastructure. For this purpose, various module placement and scheduling approaches have been developed, but considering the heterogeneous and dynamic nature in the environment is the primary concern of our work. The purpose of this paper is to present the Heterogeneous Shortest Module First (HSMF) Algorithm for placement of the modules of an application in the heterogeneous fog–cloud computing environment. Using this algorithm, we place heterogeneous modules on to the different Fog devices available in the network. The proposed approach is then compared to the available cloud-only and edge-ward application module placement approach. The results obtained from our presented framework clearly state improvement in the total execution time and total network usage.