A Brief Overview of Load Balancing Techniques in Fog Computing Environment

Emergence of IoT applications and distributed computing has propelled the development of computing services which can handle dynamic requests at the network edge. Fog computing paradigm has evolved tremendously over the years for achieving above objective. Resource management in fog layer always remains the hot spot which is required to be addressed through some efficient load balancing techniques. Heuristic, Meta-heuristic, Probabilistic, Graph theory based and hybrid load balancing techniques are developed over the past few years to manage workload incurred at the fog servers. This paper provides the brief description of such methods and their comparative analysis in a tabular form. Major area of focus is the overall technique, simulation tool, parameters of evaluation, advantages and disadvantages of the proposed load balancing approaches. Potential researchers can carry forward and extend this research at the next level after analysing the research gaps from the literature survey.