Fog-cloud System Research Articles

Retraction Note: Blockchain multi-objective optimization approach-enabled secure and cost-efficient scheduling for the internet of medical things (IoMT) in fog-cloud system

Retraction Note: Blockchain multi-objective optimization approach-enabled secure and cost-efficient scheduling for the internet of medical things (IoMT) in fog-cloud system

Quality of Service Based on Scheduling in Cloud/Fog Environment

In the area of fog and cloud computing, efficient work scheduling is critical for optimising resource allocation and raising Quality of Service (QOS) levels. Research in this area has resulted in a variety of ways for dealing with this problem. One line of research focuses on lowering data latency and improving QOS in fog-cloud systems by precise job scheduling. This requires intelligently dividing jobs across fog and cloud resources to reduce data processing and delivery delays, ultimately improving the overall user experience. Furthermore, the investigation encompasses novel methodologies such as hybrid evolutionary algorithms and heuristic strategies. These approaches seek to create a compromise between competing objectives, such as cost and energy efficiency, while also achieving QOS criteria. Researchers aim to develop scheduling systems that optimise resource utilisation and reduce operating costs without sacrificing service quality by applying evolutionary concepts or combining heuristic methods. Furthermore, ongoing discussions focus on improving resource scheduling approaches to achieve optimal QOS results. This entails continual evaluation and adaption of scheduling algorithms to changing environmental conditions, workload fluctuations, and user requests. Furthermore, developing methodologies such as the CODA approach provide intriguing avenues for efficient job scheduling in fog computing settings, with the potential to revolutionise future resource allocation and QOS enhancement efforts.

Multiprocessor task scheduling using multi-objective hybrid genetic Algorithm in Fog–cloud computing

Multiprocessor task scheduling is an operation of processing more than two tasks simultaneously in the system. The Fog–cloud multiprocessor computing structures are the categories of exchanged collateral structures with great demand from its initiation. Like other networking systems, the existing fog–cloud system based on multiprocessor systems faces some challenges. Due to the availability of excess clients and various services, scheduling and energy consumption issues are challenging. The existing problems must be resolved with proper planning to reduce makespan and energy consumption. To obtain this, an optimal scheduling approach is required. The proposed approach presents a novel methodology called Hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Energy Conscious Scheduling for better scheduling tasks over the processors. Here Genetic Algorithm and Energy conscious scheduling model are integrated. When only a Genetic Algorithm is chosen for the task scheduling approach, it becomes computationally expensive. Energy consumption becomes a huge challenge as it does not cope with complexity, making it extremely difficult to schedule appropriate tasks. When choosing the proposed hybrid Genetic algorithm, these issues can be overcome by considering optimal solutions with minimized makespan and consumed energy. A Genetic Algorithm is used to generate three primary chromosomes using priority approaches. The allocated resources are optimized through the Energy Conscious Scheduling model, and the proposed method is implemented using MATLAB. The existing methods, including genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, gravitational search algorithm, ant colony optimization and round robin models, are compared with the proposed method, proven comparatively better than existing models.

FedFog: Network-Aware Optimization of Federated Learning Over Wireless Fog-Cloud Systems

Federated learning (FL) is capable of performing large distributed machine learning tasks across multiple edge users by periodically aggregating trained local parameters. To address key challenges of enabling FL over a wireless fog-cloud system (e.g., non-i.i.d. data, users’ heterogeneity), we first propose an efficient FL algorithm based on Federated Averaging (called <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {FedFog}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) to perform the local aggregation of gradient parameters at fog servers and global training update at the cloud. Next, we employ <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {FedFog}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> in wireless fog-cloud systems by investigating a novel network-aware FL optimization problem that strikes the balance between the global loss and completion time. An iterative algorithm is then developed to obtain a precise measurement of the system performance, which helps design an efficient stopping criteria to output an appropriate number of global rounds. To mitigate the straggler effect, we propose a flexible user aggregation strategy that trains fast users first to obtain a certain level of accuracy before allowing slow users to join the global training updates. Extensive numerical results using several real-world FL tasks are provided to verify the theoretical convergence of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathsf {FedFog}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . We also show that the proposed co-design of FL and communication is essential to substantially improve resource utilization while achieving comparable accuracy of the learning model.

An approach for data integrity authentication and protection in fog computing

The data integrity verification process in cloud has become more promising research area in several Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The traditional data verification approaches use encryption in order to preserve data. Moreover, fog computing is considered as extensively employed virtualized platform and it affords various services including storage as well as services interconnected to computing and networking between user and data center based on standard cloud computing. Moreover, fog computing is an extensive description of cloud computing. Thus, fog servers effectively decrease the latency by integrating fog servers. In this paper, novel model for data integrity authentication and protection is designed in IoT cloud-fog model. This method mainly comprises fog nodes, cloud server, IoT nodes, and key distribution center. Here, dynamic and secure key is produced based on the request to key distribution center based on hashing, Exclusive OR (XOR), homomorphic encryption and polynomial. The fog nodes are employed to encrypt the data gathered from IoT nodes as well as allocate the nearby nodes based on Artificial Bee Colony-based Fuzzy-C-Means (ABC FCM) – based partitioning approach. The proposed data integrity authentication approach in IoT fog cloud system outperformed than other existing methods with respect to detection rate, computational time and memory usage of 0.8541, 34.25 s, and 54.8 MB, respectively.

A Novel Low-Latency and Energy-Efficient Task Scheduling Framework for Internet of Medical Things in an Edge Fog Cloud System.

In healthcare, there are rapid emergency response systems that necessitate real-time actions where speed and efficiency are critical; this may suffer as a result of cloud latency because of the delay caused by the cloud. Therefore, fog computing is utilized in real-time healthcare applications. There are still limitations in response time, latency, and energy consumption. Thus, a proper fog computing architecture and good task scheduling algorithms should be developed to minimize these limitations. In this study, an Energy-Efficient Internet of Medical Things to Fog Interoperability of Task Scheduling (EEIoMT) framework is proposed. This framework schedules tasks in an efficient way by ensuring that critical tasks are executed in the shortest possible time within their deadline while balancing energy consumption when processing other tasks. In our architecture, Electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors are used to monitor heart health at home in a smart city. ECG sensors send the sensed data continuously to the ESP32 microcontroller through Bluetooth (BLE) for analysis. ESP32 is also linked to the fog scheduler via Wi-Fi to send the results data of the analysis (tasks). The appropriate fog node is carefully selected to execute the task by giving each node a special weight, which is formulated on the basis of the expected amount of energy consumed and latency in executing this task and choosing the node with the lowest weight. Simulations were performed in iFogSim2. The simulation outcomes show that the suggested framework has a superior performance in reducing the usage of energy, latency, and network utilization when weighed against CHTM, LBS, and FNPA models.

Blockchain multi-objective optimization approach-enabled secure and cost-efficient scheduling for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in fog-cloud system

Blockchain multi-objective optimization approach-enabled secure and cost-efficient scheduling for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in fog-cloud system

A Microservice-Based System for Industrial Internet of Things in Fog-Cloud Assisted Network

Nowadays, the usage of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in practical applications has increased. The primary utilization is a fog cloud network, which offers different services, such as network and remote edges, at different places. Existing studies implemented the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on the fog-cloud network to run IIoT applications, such as e-healthcare, e-agriculture, renewable energy, etc. However, due to the applications' monolithic property, issues like failures, security, and cost factors occur, e.g. the failure of one service in SOA affects monolithic applications' performance in the system. With this motivation, this study suggests a microservice-based system to deal with the cost, security, and failure risks of IIoT applications in the fog-cloud system. The study improves the existing SOA systems for e-healthcare, e-agriculture, and renewable energy and minimizes the applications' overall cost. The performance evaluation shows that the devised systems outperform the existing SOA system in terms of failure, cost, and the deadline for all applications.

An evolutionary fuzzy scheduler for multi-objective resource allocation in fog computing

With rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), a vast amount of raw data produced by IoT devices needs to be processed promptly. Compared to cloud computing, fog computing nodes are closer to data resource for decreasing the end-to-end transmission latency. Considering the limited resource of IoT devices, offloading computationally-intensive tasks to the servers with high computing capability is essential in the IoT–fog–cloud system to complete those tasks on time. In this work, we propose a fuzzy logical offloading strategy for IoT applications characterized by uncertain parameters to optimize both agreement index and robustness. A multi-objective Estimation of Distribution Algorithm (EDA) is designed to learn and optimize the fuzzy offloading strategy from a diversity of the applications. The algorithm partitions applications into independent clusters, so that each cluster can be allocated to the corresponding tier for further processing. Thus, system resources are saved by making scheduling decisions in a reduced search space. Simulation studies on benchmark problems and real-world cases are carried out to verify the efficiency of our proposed algorithm. Pareto sets produced by our algorithm outperformed classic heuristic solutions for 88.3% benchmark cases and dominated Pareto sets of two state-of-art multi-objective algorithms for 92.7% and 94.4% cases correspondingly.

An Automated Task Scheduling Model Using Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II for Fog-Cloud Systems

Processing data from Internet of Things (IoT) applications at the cloud centers has known limitations relating to latency, task scheduling, and load balancing. Hence, there have been a shift towards adopting fog computing as a complementary paradigm to cloud systems. In this article, we first propose a multi-objective task-scheduling optimization problem that minimizes both the makespans and total costs in a fog-cloud environment. Then, we suggest an optimization model based on a Discrete Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (DNSGA-II) to deal with the discrete multi-objective task-scheduling problem and to automatically allocate tasks that should be executed either on fog or cloud nodes. The NSGA-II algorithm is adapted to discretize crossover and mutation evolutionary operators, rather than using continuous operators that require high computational resources and not able to allocate proper computing nodes. In our model, the communications between the fog and cloud tiers are formulated as a multi-objective function to optimize the execution of tasks. The proposed model allocates computing resources that would effectively run on either the fog or cloud nodes. Moreover, it efficiently organizes the distribution of workloads through various computing resources at the fog. Several experiments are conducted to determine the performance of the proposed model compared with a continuous NSGA-II (CNSGA-II) algorithm and four peer mechanisms. The outcomes demonstrate that the model is capable of achieving dynamic task scheduling with minimizing the total execution times (i.e., makespans) and costs in fog-cloud environments.

MFP: an approach to delay and energy-efficient module placement in IoT applications based on multi-fog

One of the challenges of using fog computing in IoT systems is the efficient placement of resources in IoT applications. This paper presents a resource placement method for fog-based IoT systems to reduce their latency and energy consumption. Given the limited processing power of fog nodes, only a limited number of modules can be run on these nodes. In fog-cloud systems, placing the modules on fog nodes instead of the cloud layer can be expected to reduce system latency. Therefore, to achieve enhanced latency and energy consumption, this paper introduces a multi-zone fog layer architecture where each zone is a multi-fog. The core idea of ​​the proposal is to use the idle processing capacity of fog nodes in each zone through the maximal placement of modules on these nodes. The paper also presents an algorithm called MFP for carrying out this placement. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, it was simulated in iFogSim for two scenarios with different topologies. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme offers 16.81% lower latency and 17.75% lower energy consumption than the existing schemes.

Priority, network and energy‐aware placement of IoT‐based application services in fog‐cloud environments

Fog computing is a decentralised model which can help cloud computing for providing high quality-of-service (QoS) for the Internet of Things (IoT) application services. Service placement problem (SPP) is the mapping of services among fog and cloud resources. It plays a vital role in response time and energy consumption in fog–cloud environments. However, providing an efficient solution to this problem is a challenging task due to difficulties such as different requirements of services, limited computing resources, different delay, and power consumption profile of devices in fog domain. Motivated by this, in this study, we propose an efficient policy, called MinRE, for SPP in fog–cloud systems. To provide both QoS for IoT services and energy efficiency for fog service providers, we classify services into two categories: critical services and normal ones. For critical services, we propose MinRes, which aims to minimise response time, and for normal ones, we propose MinEng, whose goal is reducing the energy consumption of fog environment. Our extensive simulation experiments show that our policy improves the energy consumption up to 18%, the percentage of deadline satisfied services up to 14% and the average response time up to 10% in comparison with the second-best results.

A Novel Cost-Efficient Framework for Critical Heartbeat Task Scheduling Using the Internet of Medical Things in a Fog Cloud System.

Recently, there has been a cloud-based Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) solution offering different healthcare services to wearable sensor devices for patients. These services are global, and can be invoked anywhere at any place. Especially, electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors, such as Lead I and Lead II, demands continuous cloud services for real-time execution. However, these services are paid and need a lower cost-efficient process for the users. In this paper, this study considered critical heartbeat cost-efficient task scheduling problems for healthcare applications in the fog cloud system. The objective was to offer omnipresent cloud services to the generated data with minimum cost. This study proposed a novel health care based fog cloud system (HCBFS) to collect, analyze, and determine the process of critical tasks of the heartbeat medical application for the purpose of minimizing the total cost. This study devised a health care awareness cost-efficient task scheduling (HCCETS) algorithm framework, which not only schedule all tasks with minimum cost, but also executes them on their deadlines. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed task scheduling algorithm framework outperformed the existing algorithm methods in terms of cost.

Fog-cloud task scheduling of energy consumption optimisation with deadline consideration

The emerging IoT introduces many new challenges that cannot be adequately addressed by the current 'cloud-only' architectures. The cooperation of the fog and cloud is considered to be a promising architecture, which efficiently handles IoT's data processing and communications requirements. However, how to schedule tasks to better adapt to IoT real-time needs and reduce the energy in the fog-cloud system is not well addressed. In this paper, we first model the energy consumption of the fog and cloud, respectively, and formulate a task scheduling problem into a constrained optimisation problem in fog-cloud computing system. Then, an efficient deadline-energy scheduling algorithm based on ant colony optimisation (DEACO) is put forward to tackle this problem, which achieves to reduce energy consumption on the condition of satisfying the task deadline. Finally, algorithms have been simulated on the extended CloudSim simulator. The experimental results have shown that our scheduling approach reduces energy more effective.

Joint Data Compression and Computation Offloading in Hierarchical Fog-Cloud Systems

Data compression (DC) has the potential to significantly improve the computation offloading performance in hierarchical fog-cloud systems. However, it remains unknown how to optimally determine the compression ratio jointly with the computation offloading decisions and the resource allocation. This optimization problem is studied in this paper where we aim to minimize the maximum weighted energy and service delay cost (WEDC) of all users. First, we consider a scenario where DC is performed only at the mobile users. We prove that the optimal offloading decisions have a threshold structure. Moreover, a novel three-step approach employing convexification techniques is developed to optimize the compression ratios and the resource allocation. Then, we address the more general design where DC is performed at both the mobile users and the fog server. We propose three algorithms to overcome the strong coupling between the offloading decisions and the resource allocation. Numerical results show that the proposed optimal algorithm for DC at only the mobile users can reduce the WEDC by up to 65% compared to computation offloading strategies that do not leverage DC or use sub-optimal optimization approaches. The proposed algorithms with additional DC at the fog server lead to a further reduction of the WEDC.

Fog-Assisted Operational Cost Reduction for Cloud Data Centers

In this paper, we intend to reduce the operational cost of cloud data centers with the help of fog devices, which can avoid the revenue loss due to wide-area network propagation delay and save network bandwidth cost by serving nearby cloud users. Since fog devices may not be owned by a cloud service provider, they should be compensated for serving the requests of cloud users. When taking economical compensation into consideration, the optimal number of requests processed locally by each fog device should be decided. As a result, existing load balancing schemes developed for cloud data centers can not be applied directly and it is very necessary to redesign a cost-ware load balancing algorithm for the fog-cloud system. To achieve the above aim, we first formulate a fog-assisted operational cost minimization problem for the cloud service provider. Then, we design a parallel and distributed load balancing algorithm with low computational complexity based on Proximal Jacobian Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (PJ-ADMM). Finally, extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.