Latency-Aware Application Module Management for Fog Computing Environments

The fog computing paradigm has drawn significant research interest as it focuses on bringing cloud-based services closer to Internet of Things (IoT) users in an efficient and timely manner. Most of the physical devices in the fog computing environment, commonly named fog nodes, are geographically distributed, resource constrained, and heterogeneous. To fully leverage the capabilities of the fog nodes, large-scale applications that are decomposed into interdependent Application Modules can be deployed in an orderly way over the nodes based on their latency sensitivity. In this article, we propose a latency-aware Application Module management policy for the fog environment that meets the diverse service delivery latency and amount of data signals to be processed in per unit of time for different applications. The policy aims to ensure applications’ Quality of Service (QoS) in satisfying service delivery deadlines and to optimize resource usage in the fog environment. We model and evaluate our proposed policy in an iFogSim-simulated fog environment. Results of the simulation studies demonstrate significant improvement in performance over alternative latency-aware strategies.