Application placement in Fog computing with AI approach: Taxonomy and a state of the art

With the increasing use of the Internet of Things (IoT) in various fields and the need to process and store huge volumes of generated data, Fog computing was introduced to complement Cloud computing services. Fog computing offers basic services at the network for supporting IoT applications with low response time requirements. However, Fogs are distributed, heterogeneous, and their resources are limited, therefore efficient distribution of IoT applications tasks in Fog nodes, in order to meet quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) constraints is challenging. In this survey, at first, we have an overview of basic concepts of Fog computing, and then review the application placement problem in Fog computing with focus on Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. We target three main objectives with considering a characteristics of AI-based methods in Fog application placement problem: (i) categorizing evolutionary algorithms, (ii) categorizing machine learning algorithms, and (iii) categorizing combinatorial algorithms into subcategories includes a combination of machine learning and heuristic, a combination of evolutionary and heuristic, and a combinations of evolutionary and machine learning. Then the security considerations of application placement have been reviewed. Finally, we provide a number of open questions and issues as future works.