Context‐aware application scheduling in fog computing environment

Abstract Fog computing emerges as the new computing environment that stays in the proximity of end‐users and harnesses resources at the edge of the network to extend cloud‐facilities. It provides attractive solutions to the diverse range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications by executing them in the vicinity of end‐users. It is challenging to schedule these latency‐sensitive, computation‐intensive, and resource‐hungry applications on distributed, heterogeneous, and resource‐constrained Fog computing environment while ensuring time‐bound service delivery and satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of end‐users. In this paper, a context‐aware application scheduling technique is proposed for Fog computing environments that employs various parameters of device‐ and application‐level context to minimize service delivery time and satisfy QoS requirements of various IoT applications such as surveillance and game‐based applications. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated in a simulated Fog environment and compared with baseline application scheduling techniques. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed context‐aware scheduling techniques result in significant improvement in service delivery time and QoS compared to baseline scheduling techniques.