Context-aware application scheduling in fog computing environment

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.