A Novel Resource Allocation Approach for Real-Time Workloads in SDN-Based Fog Environments

Fog computing is increasingly used as a platform for processing Internet of Things applications. Thus, this architecture extends cloud computing services to the edge of the network, where processing may be cheaper and faster. One of the main challenges in providing Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, such as delay and energy consumption in the fog environment, is to pay attention to the energy limitation and low computational capacity of fog nodes, which makes it difficult to assign tasks to fog nodes. This paper first presents a mathematical model for resource allocation with the aim of reducing delay and energy while considering QoS criteria. Then, a combined genetic and grey wolf algorithm is introduced to solve the model. Note that the combination of these two algorithms leads to finding an optimal solution efficiently. Although the implementation of the proposed algorithms has processing costs and computational delay, due to the improvement of QoS criteria, this cost can be ignored. The results show that the combination and simultaneous use of the positive points of the two algorithms improves execution time and completion time of the last task, as well as energy consumption by 18.30%, 15.14%, and 10.21%, respectively, compared to the semi-greedy method.