Bi-objective optimization of application placement in fog computing environments

Fog computing has been recently introduced to complement the cloud computing paradigm and offer application services at the edge of the network. The heterogeneity of fog computational nodes makes application placement in fog infrastructures a challenging task that requires proper management in order to satisfy application requirements. This paper proposes a biobjective application placement algorithm for fog computing environments. The proposed algorithm seeks to optimally place application modules on the underlying fog devices considering applications criticality levels and security requirements. The placement problem has been formulated as a bi-objective knapsack problem and solved using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). It has been implemented using a specialized fog computing simulation tool and compared against existing placement algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed algorithm to optimize application placement in fog computing environments in terms of application performance, power efficiency and security satisfaction rates.