Load Aware Provisioning of IoT Services on Fog Computing Platform

To support the drastically increasing traffic generated by devices at the edge of the network, 5G players are urged to rethink their infrastructure design. Unfortunately, conventional Cloud infrastructures struggle to adapt to the huge volume of traffic. In this context, Fog computing has been developed to bridge Cloud data centers and edge devices servicing a multitude of heterogeneous devices. These nearby nodes offer analytics and data storage capabilities increasing considerably the capacity of the infrastructure. However, provisioning IoT applications on such a heterogeneous infrastructure, while meeting their stringent requirements is extremely challenging. In this paper, we study the Fog service provisioning issue in a practical manner. In this regard, we propose a novel strategy, which we call GO-FSP. GO-FSP optimizes the placement of IoT application components while coping with their strict performance requirements. To do so, we first propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for the IoT application provisioning problem. The latter targets to minimize the deployment cost while ensuring a load balancing between heterogeneous devices. Then, a GRASP-based approach is proposed to achieve the aforementioned objectives. Finally, we make use of the FITOR orchestration system to evaluate the performance of our solution under real conditions. Obtained results show that our scheme outperforms the related strategies.