A Heuristic Virtual Machine Scheduling Method for Load Balancing in Fog-Cloud Computing

Fog computing is emerging as a powerful and popular computing paradigm, which extends cloud computing paradigm to enable the service execution in the edge network. The mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) applications could choose the computing nodes in both fog and cloud for resource provisioning. Generally, load balancing is one of the key factors to achieve resource efficiency and avoid bottleneck, overloaded and low-load resource usage. However, it is still a challenge to realize the load balancing for the computing nodes in the fog-cloud environment. In view of this challenge, a Virtual Machine (VM) scheduling method for load balancing in fog-cloud computing is proposed in this paper. Technically, a resource model and a load balancing model are analyzed first. Then a heuristic VM scheduling method is designed through VM placement and dynamic VM scheduling by leveraging the VM live migration technique. Consequentially, experimental evaluation and comparison analysis are conducted to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed method.