An Application Placement Technique for Concurrent IoT Applications in Edge and Fog Computing Environments

Fog/Edge computing emerges as a novel computing paradigm that harnesses resources in the proximity of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices so that, alongside with the cloud servers, provide services in a timely manner. However, due to the ever-increasing growth of IoT devices with resource-hungry applications, fog/edge servers with limited resources cannot efficiently satisfy the requirements of the IoT applications. Therefore, the application placement in the fog/edge computing environment, in which several distributed fog/edge servers and centralized cloud servers are available, is a challenging issue. In this article, we propose a weighted cost model to minimize the execution time and energy consumption of IoT applications, in a computing environment with multiple IoT devices, multiple fog/edge servers and cloud servers. Besides, a new application placement technique based on the Memetic Algorithm is proposed to make batch application placement decision for concurrent IoT applications. Due to the heterogeneity of IoT applications, we also propose a lightweight pre-scheduling algorithm to maximize the number of parallel tasks for the concurrent execution. The performance results demonstrate that our technique significantly improves the weighted cost of IoT applications up to 65 percent in comparison to its counterparts.