FBRC: Optimization of task scheduling in Fog-based Region and Cloud

Fog computing preserves benefits of cloud computing and is strategically positioned to address effectively many local and performance issues because its resources and specific services are virtualized and located at the edge of the customer premises. Resource management is a critical issue affecting system performance significantly. Due to the complex distribution and high mobility of fog devices, computation resources still experience high latencies in fog's large coverage area. This paper considers a Fog-based Region and Cloud (FBRC) in which requests are locally handled not just by a region but multiple regions when additional resources are needed. An efficient task scheduling mechanism is thus essential to minimize the completion time of tasks and improve user experiences. To this end, two issues are investigated in the paper: 1) designing a fog-based region architecture to provide nearby computing resources; 2) investigating efficient scheduling algorithms to distribute tasks among regions and remote clouds. To deal with the complexity of scheduling tasks, a heuristic-based algorithm is proposed based on our formulation and validated by extensive simulations.