Resource-aware fog service placement using deferred acceptance in edge computing

Abstract

Fog computing aims at reducing network latency, bandwidth and processing delay by bringing computation resources closer to the data sources. Modern IoT applications, such as smart surveillance systems, remote health monitoring applications, ambient-aware applications etc., are time-critical and computationally intensive. For such applications, it is ideal to consider an intermediate layer of processing i.e a fog layer in addition to cloud. However, processing the workload of such IoT applications with an intermediate layer of fog nodes has several challenges. The significant challenges include the mobility of end-user nodes, dynamic patterns of workload generation leading to highly-variant resource requirements and sensitive quality of service (QOS) requirements. Hence a dynamic approach is required to precisely map the service requests from end-user devices to a suitable fog node. The optimality of a fog node for service placement depends on several factors, including location, resource utilization rates such as CPU, Memory and Disk utilization % and energy consumption. Several meta-heuristic techniques and evolutionary algorithms have been proposed in the past for optimal service placement among fog nodes. This paper investigates the applicability of a game theory-based approach called Deferred acceptance (DA) for the same. The DA algorithm, originally designed as a stable matching mechanism for the marriage market is adapted for service placement problems in fog-based IoT systems. The effectiveness of optimized service placement through the DA approach is validated experimentally. The experiment is carried out by creating a test bed that mimics a fog computing-based intelligent traffic management application. The proposed approach's performance is evaluated through parameters such as the startup time for the DA approach to produce outcomes, total execution time and handshake latency. The numerical results of the DA approach are compared with those of a simple scheduling algorithm ( FIFO) and a basic genetic algorithm-based approach. The DA approach appears to perform on par with the genetic algorithm in terms of start-up time, but exceeds the genetic algorithm with respect to stability of the outcomes produced.