A Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and Simulated Annealing With Load Balancing Mechanism for Resource Allocation in Fog-Cloud Environments

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has led to the widespread adoption of fog-cloud computing environments, where efficient resource allocation is critical for ensuring optimal performance and cost-effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid algorithm that combines Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) with Simulated Annealing (SA) and integrates a load balancing mechanism, termed PSOSA-LB, for resource allocation in fog-cloud environments. The algorithm aims to minimize the overall execution time, latency, and energy consumption while maintaining a balanced workload distribution across fog and cloud resources. The PSO component drives the exploration of the solution space by iteratively updating particle positions based on individual and collective experiences. To avoid premature convergence and escape local optima, SA is employed, allowing occasional acceptance of suboptimal solutions with a probability governed by a temperature parameter. To ensure load balancing, a load imbalance adjustment factor is incorporated into the PSO velocity update, guiding particles towards solutions that evenly distribute the computational load across available resources. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the PSOSA-LB algorithm outperforms traditional PSO, SA, and other hybrid approaches in terms of both resource utilization efficiency and load distribution. The proposed method recorded up to 33% faster execution, 35% lower latency, 20% reduced energy consumption, and 45% better load distribution, which provides a robust and scalable solution for dynamic resource management in fog-cloud environments, making it suitable for various IoT-driven applications that demand high performance and low latency.