Title: A dynamic load balancing mechanism for fog computing environment

Authors: Kamran Sattar Awaisi; Assad Abbas; Hasan Ali Khattak; Abbas Khalid; Hafiz Tayyab Rauf; Seifedine Kadry

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan ' Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan ' Department of Computing, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan ' Department of Computer Science, The University of Lahore, Lahore, Pakistan ' Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Informatics, University of Bradford, UK ' Faculty of Applied Computing and Technology, Noroff University College, Kristiansand, Norway

Abstract: Fog computing has emerged as an extension of cloud computing that provides cloud-like services at the edge of the to internet of things applications. However, the limited storage and processing capability of fog nodes along with inefficient resource scheduling creates a performance bottleneck that can result in high latency and network bandwidth. Therefore, dynamic load balancing is necessary to achieve the true benefits of fog computing. This paper proposes dynamic load balancing mechanism (DLBM) to schedule the number of service requests on fog nodes effectively. Furthermore, three algorithms to dynamically balance the load of fog nodes named are appropriate node selection, effective task distribution and global task execution and resource allocation. The performance of our proposed mechanism is compared with cloud only technique, fog-cloud-placement algorithm, and self-similarity-based load balancing technique. Comparative performance analysis validates the efficiency of the proposed approach. DLBM demonstrates considerable reduction in latency and network bandwidth utilisation.

Keywords: internet of things; IoT; fog computing; resource management; load balancing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2022.123671

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2022 Vol.18 No.3, pp.337 - 360

Received: 26 Apr 2021
Accepted: 15 Aug 2021
Published online: 30 Jun 2022 *

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