An Energy-Aware High Performance Task Allocation Strategy in Heterogeneous Fog Computing Environments

Combining the Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology with cloud computing is a significant alternative for powering the utilization of computing resources in a connected environment. A grand challenge in communications is raised by the emergence of big data, due to the large-sized data transmissions and frequent data exchanges. Applying fog computing is considered an option for resolving the communication challenge. However, a high extent of available heterogeneous computing attached to fog computing servers leads to a restriction of the resource management. This Article addresses the resource management issue by proposing a novel approach-named Energy-aware Fog Resource Optimization (EFRO) model-to optimizing the utilization of connected devices in fog computing. We develop a heuristic algorithm minimizing both energy cost and time consumption in a holistic way. A salient feature of EFRO lies in the integration of the standardization and smart shift operations fueled by a hill-climbing mechanism to produce near-optimal resource allocation solutions. Experimental results demonstrate that our EFRO is adroit at making near-optimal decisions in managing resources in fog computing environments. In particular, EFRO boosts the energy efficiency of the existing MESF and RR schemes by 54.83 and 71.28 percent, respectively. EFRO shortens DECM's allocation-generation time by up to a factor of 507.