Load balancing between fog and cloud in fog of things based platforms through software-defined networking

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows for the coordination and orchestration of a large number of physical and virtual objects connected to the Internet. Sensors used in IoT applications may be in remote locations with an unstable network infrastructure or with limited management of their functions due to processing overload on devices responsible for performing their management (i.e. IoT Gateways) through IoT services. A failure or overload on a network link associated with an IoT Gateway, or failure on the IoT Gateway itself due to processing overload, may result in temporary or even permanent unavailability in IoT applications (Web, Mobile, and Desktop). To address these problems, this paper presents a solution for the need to execute load balancing for the Fog of Things Platforms (in the Fog, and between Fog and Cloud) via the programmability through the use of Software-Defined Networks (SDN). The IoT environment proposed in this work is based on the Fog of Things (FoT) paradigm, which proposes the provision of processing, storage and IoT services at edge devices (local network), optimizing, when possible, the use of IoT services in the Cloud. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).