Resource Management Approaches in Fog Computing: a Comprehensive Review

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been one of the most popular technologies that facilitate new interactions among things and humans to enhance the quality of life. With the rapid development of IoT, the fog computing paradigm is emerging as an attractive solution for processing the data of IoT applications. In the fog environment, IoT applications are executed by the intermediate computing nodes in the fog, as well as the physical servers in cloud data centers. On the other hand, due to the resource limitations, resource heterogeneity, dynamic nature, and unpredictability of fog environment, it necessitates the resource management issues as one of the challenging problems to be considered in the fog landscape. Despite the importance of resource management issues, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any systematic, comprehensive and detailed survey on the field of resource management approaches in the fog computing context. In this paper, we provide a systematic literature review (SLR) on the resource management approaches in fog environment in the form of a classical taxonomy to recognize the state-of-the-art mechanisms on this important topic and providing open issues as well. The presented taxonomy are classified into six main fields: application placement, resource scheduling, task offloading, load balancing, resource allocation, and resource provisioning. The resource management approaches are compared with each other according to the important factors such as the performance metrics, case studies, utilized techniques, and evaluation tools as well as their advantages and disadvantages are discussed.