Ultra-low latency cloud-fog computing for industrial Internet of Things

Recently, the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has drawn high attention in academia and industry in the context of industry 4.0. In the IIoT, smart IoT devices are adopted to improve production efficiency. But, these devices will generate huge amounts of production data, which need to be processed effectively. To support IIoT services efficiently, cloud computing is usually considered as one of the possible solutions. However, the IIoT services still suffer from the high-latency and unreliable links problem between cloud and IIoT terminals. To combat these issues, fog computing is a promising solution which extends computing and storage to the network edge. In this paper, we are motivated to integrate the fog computing to the cloud-based IIoT to build a cloud-fog integrated IIoT (CF-IIoT) network. To achieve the ultra-low service response latency, we introduce the distributed computing to the CF-IIoT network and propose leveraging the real-coded genetic algorithm for constrained optimization problem(RCGA-CO) algorithm to optimize the load balancing problem of the distributed cloud-fog network. Most importantly, considering the unreliable situation in the CF-IIoT (e.g., fog nodes damage, wireless links outage), we propose a task reallocation and retransmission mechanism to reduce the average service latency of the CF-IIoT network architecture. The performance evaluation results validate that the RCGA-CO-based CF-IIoT and our proposed mechanism can provide ultra-low latency service in IIoT scenario.