Fog Environment Research Articles

An efficient deep reinforcement learning based task scheduler in cloud-fog environment

Efficient task scheduling in cloud and fog computing environments remains a significant challenge due to the diverse nature and critical processing requirements of tasks originating from heterogeneous devices. Traditional scheduling methods often struggle with high latency and inadequate processing times, especially in applications demanding strict computational efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an advanced fog-cloud integration approach utilizing a deep reinforcement learning-based task scheduler, DRLMOTS (Deep Reinforcement Learning based Multi Objective Task Scheduler in Cloud Fog Environment). This novel scheduler intelligently evaluates task characteristics, such as length and processing capacity, to dynamically allocate computation to either fog nodes or cloud resources. The methodology leverages a Deep Q-Learning Network model and includes extensive simulations using both randomized workloads and real-world Google Jobs Workloads. Comparative analysis demonstrates that DRLMOTS significantly outperforms existing baseline algorithms such as CNN, LSTM, and GGCN, achieving a substantial reduction in makespan by up to 26.80%, 18.84, and 13.83% and decreasing energy consumption by up to 39.60%, 30.29%, and 27.11%. Additionally, the proposed scheduler enhances fault tolerance, showcasing improvements of up to 221.89%, 17.05%, and 11.05% over conventional methods. These results validate the efficiency and robustness of DRLMOTS in optimizing task scheduling in fog-cloud environments.

SERAV Deep-MAD: Deep Learning-Based Security–Reliability–Availability Aware Multiple D2D Environment

The tremendous growth of internet-connected devices can lead to network congestion, making it essential to incorporate new technologies to optimize performance. Thus, Device to Device(D2D) communication has been deemed as an emerging technology that can be used to communicate efficiently. However, establishing a secure and reliable mechanism for Device-to-Device (D2D) communication that ensures security, reliability, and availability poses a significant challenge. To tackle these issues a novel deep learning-based security-reliability-availability aware multiple D2D environment (SERAV Deep-MAD) has been proposed for Secure D-2-D Communication in a Fog environment. The proposed method utilizes a Fully Homomorphic Quantum Diffie Hellman Encryption (FHQDHE) to secure the data while transmitting. The proposed method utilizes the novel secure Quantum Diffie Hellman key exchange (QDHKE) technique for sharing the key to transform the plain data into cipher data, then applies FH operations on the encrypted data before transferring it to the Fog environment. Whenever a client requests data from the Fog, the Fog provider verifies the client's access rights. Moreover, the Attention-based Bi-GRU model is utilized to categorize whether the device is non-attack or attack, if the data is attacked then the proposed model classifies multiple attacks. The NS2 Simulator is used to verify and validate the proposed SERAV Deep-MAD model, and resiliency analysis is done to assess performance. The proposed techniques attain a higher accuracy of 98.18% which is 1.58%, 2.02%, and 2.41% better than MECC, MIMO, andAAKA-D2D respectively.

Energy Conscious Squirrel Search based Task Scheduling Mechanism in Fog Environment

ABSTRACTThe swift explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the past few years has resulted in a deluge of data that requires timely processing. However, transmitting such massive amounts of data in and out from cloud leads to high latency and network bandwidth. Consequently, the field of fog computing has turned out as a feasible platform for utilizing resources within the vicinity of IoT devices for providing services in a timely manner. The resource constrained trait of fog nodes demands judicious management of resources in satisfying the requirements of IoT applications. This makes energy efficiency a core issue in fog networks. This article addresses the issue of energy efficiency by proposing an energy conscious squirrel search algorithm (EcSSA) for scheduling tasks in fog environment. A salient feature of EcSSA lies in the novel objective function that aims to optimize the energy consumption by minimizing the cumulative active time of all nodes in the network. Simulation studies conducted as part of this work demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves average energy consumption, average makespan, and carbon dioxide emission rate in comparison to the existing algorithms.

An adaptive binary classifier for highly imbalanced datasets on the Edge

Edge machine learning brings intelligence to low-power devices at the periphery of a network. By running machine learning algorithms on the Edge, classification can be performed faster without the need to transmit large data volumes across a network. However, on-device training is often not feasible since Edge devices have limited computing and storage resources. Improved, Scalable, Efficient, and Fast classifieR (iSEFR) is a classifier that performs both training and testing on low-power devices using linearly separable balanced datasets. The novelty of this work is the improvement of the iSEFR accuracy by fine-tuning the algorithm with datasets having an uneven class distribution. Three adaptive linear function transformation techniques were proposed to improve the decision threshold which is in the form of a linear function. Experiments using stratified sampling with 5-fold cross-validation demonstrate that one of the proposed techniques significantly improved F1-score, Recall and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) by an average of 23%, 35% and 21% compared to iSEFR. Further evaluation of this technique in a Fog environment using highly imbalanced datasets such as credit card fraud, network intrusion and diabetic retinopathy also showed a significant increase of 38%, 44% and 30% in F1-score, Recall and MCC with a Precision of 97%. The adaptive binary classifier maintained the time complexity of iSEFR without altering the class imbalance.

Optimized Dynamic Service Placement for Enhanced Scheduling in Fog-Edge Computing Environments

The traditional cloud computing model struggles to efficiently handle the vast number of Internet of Things (IoT) services due to its centralized nature and physical distance from end-users. In contrast, edge and fog computing have emerged as promising solutions for supporting latency-sensitive IoT applications by distributing computational resources closer to the data source. However, these technologies are limited by their size and computational capacities, making optimal service placement a critical challenge. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a dynamic and distributed service placement policy tailored for edge and fog environments. By leveraging the inherent advantages of proximity in fog and edge nodes, the proposed policy seeks to enhance service delivery efficiency, reduce latency, and improve resource utilization. The proposed method focuses on optimizing the placement of high-demand services closer to the data generation sources to enhance scheduling efficiency in fog computing environments. Our method is divided into three interconnected modules. The first module is the service type estimator, which is responsible for distributing services to appropriate nodes. Here, we use the Political Optimizer (PO) as a new metaheuristic algorithm for deploying IoT services. The second module is service dependency estimator, which manages service dependencies. Here, we load dependent services near the data using a path matrix based on the Warshall algorithm. Finally, the third module is resource demand scheduling, which estimates resource demand to facilitate optimal scheduling. Here, we use a popularity-based policy to manage resource demand and service execution scheduling. Implementation results demonstrate significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art policies, highlighting the efficacy of the proposed policy in enhancing service delivery within fog-edge computing frameworks.

Study on powdering properties of silicone rubber insulating material in a coastal area

Abstract Silicone rubber insulation materials are widely used in energy systems. The powdering of silicone rubber sheds is a newly discovered aging phenomenon in recent years, and there is no specific research. In this paper, the powder composition of the composite insulators in coastal areas was studied, and the powdering process of silicone rubber under a high humidity environment of salt fog was repeated in the laboratory. The results show that the powders can be divided into two types according to particle shape, element composition, and molecule groups: the inorganic filler and its dehydrated product and the small molecule siloxane after polymer aging fracture. The particle size of Type I of powder is 3∼8μm, and the particle size of Type II of small molecule siloxane is 0.3∼1.1μm. The surface hydrophobicity of the powdered sample in a salt-fog environment will deteriorate, and the static contact angle will decrease. However, the hydrophobicity will gradually recover after leaving the harsh environment. Powdering of composite insulator silicone rubber in coastal areas is a complex physical and chemical process caused by the combined action of electricity, heat, and moisture. During this, polymer molecular chains break, and fillers gradually precipitate, forming powders.

A Fast and High-Accuracy Foreign Object Detection Method for Belt Conveyor Coal Flow Images with Target Occlusion.

Foreign objects in coal flow easily cause damage to conveyor belts, and most foreign objects are often occluded, making them difficult to detect. Aiming at solving the problems of low accuracy and efficiency in the detection of occluded targets in a low-illumination and dust fog environment, an image detection method for foreign objects is proposed. Firstly, YOLOv5s back-end processing is optimized by soft non-maximum suppression to reduce the influence of dense objects. Secondly, SimOTA label allocation is used to reduce the influence of ambiguous samples under dense occlusion. Then, Slide Loss is used to excavate difficult samples, and Inner-SIoU is used to optimize the bounding box regression loss. Finally, Group-Taylor pruning is used to compress the model. The experimental results show that the proposed method has only 4.20 × 105 parameters, a computational amount of 1.00 × 109, a model size of 1.20 MB, and an mAP0.5 of up to 91.30% on the self-built dataset. The detection speed on the different computing devices is as high as 66.31, 41.90, and 33.03 FPS. This proves that the proposed method achieves fast and high-accuracy detection of multi-layer occluded coal flow foreign objects.

A cost, time, energy-aware workflow scheduling using adaptive PSO algorithm in a cloud–fog environment

A cost, time, energy-aware workflow scheduling using adaptive PSO algorithm in a cloud–fog environment

Towards intrusion detection in fog environments using generative adversarial network and long short-term memory network

Recently, fog computing has been developed to complement cloud computing, which can provide cloud services at the edge of the network with real-time processing. However, the computational power of fog nodes is limited and this leads to security issues. On the other hand, cyber-attacks have become common with the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices. This fact necessitates the development of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) in fog environments with the aim of detecting attacks. In this paper, we develop an IDS named GAN-LSTM for fog environments that uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs). GAN-LSTM is used to identify anomalies in network traffic to specific types of attacks or non-attacks. In general, GAN-LSTM consists of three components: data preprocessing, generation of real traffic patterns, and sequence analysis of real traffic data. Data preprocessing ensures data quality by removing noise and irrelevant features. The pre-processed data is fed to the GAN to generate real traffic as a baseline for normal behavior. Finally, the LSTM component is applied to detect anomalous anomalies in fog computing. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on public databases and experimental results showed that GAN-LSTM improves the accuracy of attack detection compared to equivalent approaches.

An Improved Graph Partitioning Algorithm Based Approach for Workflow Offloading in a Fog Environment

An Improved Graph Partitioning Algorithm Based Approach for Workflow Offloading in a Fog Environment

Databases in Edge and Fog Environments: A Survey

While a significant number of databases are deployed in cloud environments, pushing part or all data storage and querying planes closer to their sources (i.e., to the edge) can provide advantages in latency, connectivity, privacy, energy, and scalability. This article dissects the advantages provided by databases in edge and fog environments by surveying application domains and discussing the key drivers for pushing database systems to the edge. At the same time, it also identifies the main challenges faced by developers in this new environment and analyzes the mechanisms employed to deal with them. By providing an overview of the current state of edge and fog databases, this survey provides valuable insights into future research directions.

Research on a Recognition Algorithm for Traffic Signs in Foggy Environments Based on Image Defogging and Transformer.

The efficient and accurate identification of traffic signs is crucial to the safety and reliability of active driving assistance and driverless vehicles. However, the accurate detection of traffic signs under extreme cases remains challenging. Aiming at the problems of missing detection and false detection in traffic sign recognition in fog traffic scenes, this paper proposes a recognition algorithm for traffic signs based on pix2pixHD+YOLOv5-T. Firstly, the defogging model is generated by training the pix2pixHD network to meet the advanced visual task. Secondly, in order to better match the defogging algorithm with the target detection algorithm, the algorithm YOLOv5-Transformer is proposed by introducing a transformer module into the backbone of YOLOv5. Finally, the defogging algorithm pix2pixHD is combined with the improved YOLOv5 detection algorithm to complete the recognition of traffic signs in foggy environments. Comparative experiments proved that the traffic sign recognition algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the impact of a foggy environment on traffic sign recognition. Compared with the YOLOv5-T and YOLOv5 algorithms in moderate fog environments, the overall improvement of this algorithm is achieved. The precision of traffic sign recognition of the algorithm in the fog traffic scene reached 78.5%, the recall rate was 72.2%, and mAP@0.5 was 82.8%.

The research on infrared radiation affected by smoke or fog in different environmental temperatures

Infrared thermal imaging camera as a non-contact monitoring of the object to be measured is widely used in fire detection, driving assistance and so on. Although there are many related studies, there is a lack of research on the influence of fog or smoke on infrared imaging under different environmental temperatures. To address this shortcoming, The temperature of both the environment and the target in this experiment is controlled by PID technology. The smoke or fog environment is generated using a smoke cake or an ultrasonic fog machine. The temperature of the target was measured by infrared thermal imaging camera. It was observed that as the temperature of the environment increases, the measured temperature of the target also increases. However, the change in temperature is more pronounced in the fog environment compared to either the smoke environment or the normal environment. It has been found through research that environmental radiation causes temperature changes in fog droplets. Therefore, Infrared radiation is less affected in the smoke environment and more affected in the fog environment. Additionally, when the environmental temperature is close to the target's temperature, the infrared image becomes blurred.

AdaBoost‐powered cloud of things framework for low‐latency, energy‐efficient chronic kidney disease prediction

AbstractThe United Nations' sustainable development agenda has set an ambitious goal of reducing premature mortality from non‐communicable diseases by 33% by 2030. Among these diseases, chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a significant contributor to both morbidity and mortality. Integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing in healthcare has gained momentum, particularly in remote patient monitoring. However, it is essential to acknowledge that cloud computing has limitations, particularly in handling vast volumes of Big Data, mainly due to scalability and latency concerns. This article proposes a novel framework, AdaBoostCoTCKD, to mitigate latency issues, minimize response times, reduce power consumption, and optimize network resources for predicting CKD. The framework leverages the synergy between the AdaBoost machine learning technique and fog computing paradigms to enhance the precision and efficiency of CKD prediction methods. In addition, it introduces an auxiliary cloud‐based database, enriching the pool of future insights and facilitating prospective database infrastructure expansions. This augmentation is expected to impact predictive accuracy positively. We conducted comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our model achieved an impressive training accuracy of 99.928% and testing accuracy of 99.975%, while the fog environment reduced latency by 31% and energy consumption by 75% compared to traditional cloud‐based solutions. Our proposed system enables early CKD detection and offers advantages over cloud‐only solutions, providing a robust and efficient platform for healthcare IoT applications with significant clinical value. These promising results underscore the potential of combining fog computing and the AdaBoost machine learning technique to advance healthcare by addressing latency, response time, power consumption, and network resource optimization challenges in CKD prediction.

Learning Framework for Joint Optimal Node Placement and Resource Management in Dynamic Fog Environment

Background: With recent improvements in fog computing, it is now feasible to offer faster response time and better service delivery quality; however, the impending challenge is to place the fog nodes within the environment optimally. A review of existing literature showcases that consideration of joint problems such as fog node placement and resource management are less reported. Irrespective of different available methodologies, it is noted that a learning scheme facilitates better capability to incorporate intelligence in the network device, which can act as an enabling technique for superior operation of fog nodes. Objective: The prime objective of the study is to introduce simplified and novel computational modelling toward the optimal placement of fog nodes with improved resource allocation mechanisms concerning bandwidth Methods: Implemented in Python, the proposed scheme performs predictive operations using the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) method. Markov modelling is used to frame the model. OpenAI Gym library is used for environment modelling, bridging communication between the environment and the learning agent. Results: Quantitative results indicate that the proposed scheme performs better than existing schemes by approximately 30%. Conclusion: The prime innovative approach introduced is the implementation of a reinforcement learning algorithm with a Markov chain towards enriching the predictive analytical capabilities of the controller system with faster service relaying operations a.

Failure analysis of thermoplastic composites subject to galvanic corrosion in hybrid metal–composite joints

The damage sustained by carbon fibre reinforced polymers due to the effect of galvanic corrosion induced by coupling between carbon fibres and a metallic material in a hybrid joint is investigated. Composite laminates with two fibre architectures and two thermoplastic matrices (polycarbonate and polyamide 6) are coupled to a metallic fastener and exposed to salted fog conditions. Both the effects of the salted fog environment and the coupled effect of the environmental and the galvanic corrosion are analysed. The analysis is centred in, firstly, characterising the functional properties of the hybrid joint, secondly characterising the laminate properties and finally characterising the chemical degradation of the matrix. The results show a degradation of properties for the polycarbonate material, in terms of bearing performance and interlaminar shear strength as well as presenting obvious changes in the thermal characterisation. The polyamide composites remain largely unaffected and only minor changes in the surface appearance are noteworthy.

HybOff: a Hybrid Offloading approach to improve load balancing in fog environments

Load balancing is crucial in distributed systems like fog computing, where efficiency is paramount. Offloading with different approaches is the key to balancing the load in distributed environments. Static offloading (SoA) falls short in heterogeneous networks, necessitating dynamic offloading to reduce latency in time-sensitive tasks. However, prevalent dynamic offloading (PoA) solutions often come with hidden costs that impact sensitive applications, including decision time, networks congested and distance offloading. This paper introduces the Hybrid Offloading (HybOff) algorithm, which substantially enhances load balancing and resource utilization in fog networks, addressing issues in both static and dynamic approaches while leveraging clustering theory. Its goal is to create an uncomplicated low-cost offloading approach that enhances IoT application performance by eliminating the consequences of hidden costs regardless of network size. Experimental results using the iFogSim simulation tool show that HybOff significantly reduces offloading messages, distance, and decision-offloading consequences. It improves load balancing by 97%, surpassing SoA (64%) and PoA (88%). Additionally, it increases system utilization by an average of 50% and enhances system performance 1.6 times and 1.4 times more than SoA and PoA, respectively. In summary, this paper tries to introduce a new offloading approach in load balancing research in fog environments.

Dynamic microservice placement in multi-tier Fog networks

Fog computing extends Cloud-like infrastructure to the Edge, advancing Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) applications in which parts of business-oriented enterprise systems, decoupled via fine-grained microservices, can be deployed in Fog networks in proximity to sensor devices. It boosts the responsiveness to IIoT events significantly where timely decision-making and actions are required, particularly for problematic trends and anomalies. However, microservice placement is a non-trivial problem in IIoT settings, given the dynamic occurrence of different IIoT events and variable resource needs of microservices against resource-constrained, heterogeneous, and distributed Fog devices. The cost of matching and deploying microservices in real-time, highly dynamic, and contentious settings can easily exceed the benefit of just-in-time Edge deployments. Current studies largely focus on managing the microservice placement from Cloud servers and offloading to the Cloud when Fog devices are resource-deficient. Yet, there is a lack of research focusing on efficient Fog resource use and managing the placement at the edge to improve the responsiveness. The complexity increases when multiple inter-dependent microservices with similar priorities are required to be placed on the same Fog devices. To mitigate this, we develop a tiered framework for dynamic microservice placement, in which costly resource decision-making for microservices is dedicated to Master Fog devices and Citizen Fog devices are exclusively assigned to executing microservice requests. Firstly, we implement a priority-based algorithm in each Master Fog device to identify the high-priority Edge-required microservices. Secondly, we sort the Fog devices according to their resource availability and place the microservices based on their priority and dependencies. Thirdly, we implement the strategies for microservice placement, scaling and request escalation in each Master Fog, managing a small number of Citizen Fog devices. These exempt the Citizen Fog devices from common resource and communication management responsibilities and enable them to allocate more resources to Edge-required microservices with a higher number of instances. Finally, we implement and evaluate our framework in a simulated Fog environment. The results outperform state-of-the-art frameworks in terms of efficient resource utilisation, resulting in reduced Cloud dependency by one-third compared to other approaches and average application execution time by 65–70%.

Decoy Security for Chronical data in Fog Environment

Decoy Security for Chronical data in Fog Environment

TwI-FTM: Two-way IoT-FoG trust management scheme for task offloading in IoT-FoG networks

Based on trust management, the service establishment between IoT/User devices and fog networks reduces the impact of malicious data and nodes. Hence, building a trusted environment in the IoT and fog layers is very important. There is no assurance that the generated data or task is standard data; it may also have abnormal data to modify its originality. Similarly, the nodes in the fog environment also have malicious nodes during task offloading. For this, the novel Two-way IoT data & Fog Trust management (TwI-FTM) algorithm is proposed to identify the abnormal data with the help of the Trusted Data Measurement (TDM) and Fog Access Trust Evaluation (FATE) method for identifying the malicious fog access nodes in fog network. Identifying these abnormal data and malicious fog access nodes is done by continuously monitoring fog control nodes with the threshold level. Once it is identified, they will automatically be removed from the IoT-FoG network. The obtained trust measurements are analyzed and compared with other existing methods; it is identified that the proposed TwI-FTM outperforms and has a higher trust degree of 0.68 compared with others. It achieved higher detection accuracy of malicious fog access nodes in fog networks at 21 %, 16 %, and 14 % compared with OTM, TTM, and SLA-Trust, respectively. Finally, the task completion time was also reduced, and it was achieved at 4.5 ms, 5 ms, and 13 ms compared with TTM, OTM, and SLA-Trust, respectively.