Application Provisioning in FOG Computing-enabled Internet-of-Things: A Network Perspective.

The emergence of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has inspired numerous new applications. However, due to the limited resources in current IoT infrastructures and the stringent quality of-service requirements of the applications, providing computing and communication supports for the applications is becoming increasingly difficult. In this paper, we consider IoT applications that receive continuous data streams from multiple sources in the network, and study joint application placement and data routing to support all data streams with both bandwidth and delay guarantees. We formulate the application provisioning problem both for a single application and for multiple applications, with both cases proved to be NP-hard. For the case with a single application, we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme. For the multi-application scenario, if the applications can be parallelized among multiple distributed instances, we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme; for general non-parallelizable applications, we propose a randomized algorithm and analyze its performance. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms greatly improve the quality-of-service of the IoT applications compared to the heuristics.