Industrial IoT Data Scheduling Based on Hierarchical Fog Computing: A Key for Enabling Smart Factory

Industry 4.0 or industrial Internet of things (IIoT) has become one of the most talked-about industrial business concepts in recent years. Thus, to efficiently integrate Internet of things technology into industry, the collected and sensed data from IIoT need to be scheduled in real-time constraints, especially for big factories. To this end, we propose in this paper a hierarchical fog servers’ deployment at the network service layer across different tiers. Using probabilistic analysis models, we prove the efficiency of the proposed hierarchical fog computing compared with the flat architecture. In this paper, IIoT data and requests are divided into both high priority and low priority requests; the high priority requests are urgent/emergency demands that need to be scheduled rapidly. Therefore, we use two-priority queuing model in order to schedule and analyze IIoT data. Finally, we further introduce a workload assignment algorithm to offload peak loads over higher tiers of the fog hierarchy. Using realistic industrial data from Bosch group, the benefits of the proposed architecture compared to the conventional flat design are proved using various performance metrics and through extensive simulations.