Heterogeneous cloudlet deployment and user-cloudlet association toward cost effective fog computing

Both mobile computing and cloud computing have experienced rapid development in recent years. Although centralized cloud computing exhibits abundant resources for computation-intensive tasks, the unpredictable and unstable communication latency between the mobile users and the cloud makes it challenging to handle latency-sensitive mobile computing tasks. To address this issue, fog computing recently was proposed by pushing the cloud computing to the network edge closer to the users. To realize such vision, we can augment existing access points in wireless networks with cloudlet servers for hosting various mobile computing tasks. In this paper, we investigate how to deploy the servers in a cost-effective manner without violating the predetermined quality of service. In particular, we practically consider that the available cloudlet servers are heterogeneous, ie, with different cost and resource capacities. The problem is formulated into an integer linear programming form, and a low-complexity heuristic algorithm is invented to address it. Extensive simulation studies validate the efficiency of our algorithm by it performs much close to the optimal solution.