A latency-aware task scheduling algorithm for allocating virtual machines in a cost-effective and time-sensitive fog-cloud architecture

Recently, with the expansion of communications and generated data, the need for processing this high volume of data in minimum time and maximum speed has increased. Also, performing this volume of computing operations requires high processing and storage resources leading to hardware cost increment. In such systems, one of the most critical challenges is the task scheduling problem, which tries to find the optimal allocation for maximum resource usage and reduce the response time. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design an infrastructure for smart home energy management with minimum hardware cost using cloud and fog computing and to propose a latency-aware scheduling algorithm based on virtual machine matching using meta-heuristics. Among heuristic methods, Tabu search makes it a common practice because of its high expansion in various optimization issues, as well as memory and high-speed features. Thereby, a novel algorithm based on the Tabu search is proposed that is improved using approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) and fruit fly optimization (FOA) algorithms. Finally, to validate the proposed method, a case study is simulated and the proposed algorithm is implemented considering target factors of execution time, latency, allocated memory, and cost function to illustrate the performance of the algorithm. The comparison results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the Tabu search, genetic algorithm, PSO, and simulated annealing methods.