Profit-aware application placement for integrated Fog-Cloud computing environments

Abstract The marketplace for Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled smart systems is rapidly expanding. The integration of Fog and Cloud paradigm aims at harnessing both edge device and remote datacentre-based computing resources to meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of these smart systems. Due to lack of instance pricing and revenue maximizing techniques, it becomes difficult for service providers to make comprehensive profit from such integration. This problem further intensifies when associated expenses and allowances are charged from the revenue. Conversely, the rigid revenue maximizing intention of providers affects user’s budget and system’s service quality. To address these issues, we propose a profit-aware application placement policy for integrated Fog–Cloud environments. It is formulated using constraint Integer Linear Programming model that simultaneously enhances profit and ensures QoS during application placement on computing instances. Furthermore, it provides compensation to users for any violation of Service Level Agreement (SLA) and sets the price of instances according to their ability of reducing service delivery time. The performance of proposed policy is evaluated in a simulated Fog–Cloud environment using iFogSim and the results demonstrate that it outperforms other placement policies in concurrently increasing provider’s profit and user’s QoS satisfaction rate.