Resource provisioning in edge/fog computing: A Comprehensive and Systematic Review

Close computing paradigms such as fog and edge have become promising technologies for mobile applications running on pervasive mobile equipment utilized by a wide range of users to remove such types of equipment' inherent limitations. In such environments, competition is a severe challenge to gain computation and communication resources' capabilities. Therefore, resource allocation in the mentioned environments are becoming a requirement, which is an essential challenging issue addressed by different approaches, including resource provisioning. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, any systematic, comprehensive, and detailed survey related to resource provisioning has not been applied in computation environments despite its importance. This paper provides a review of the resource provisioning approaches in computation paradigms in the form of a standard classification to identify the existing approaches on this critical topic and offer open issues. The proposed classification can be organized into five main fields: framework-based, heuristic/meta-heuristicbased, model-based, machine learning-based, and game theoretic-based mechanisms. Next, these classes are compared based on some essential features such as performance metrics, case studies, utilized techniques, and evaluation tools. Finally, open issues and uncovered or insufficiently covered future research challenges, including resource performance, resource location, uncertainties, resource elasticity, and resource migration are discussed, and the survey is concluded.