Computational resource provisioning that is closer to a user is becoming
increasingly important, with a rise in the number of devices making continuous
service requests and with the significant recent take up of latency-sensitive
applications, such as streaming and real-time data processing. Fog computing
provides a solution to such types of applications by bridging the gap between
the user and public/private cloud infrastructure via the inclusion of a "fog"
layer. Such approach is capable of reducing the overall processing latency, but
the issues of redundancy, cost-effectiveness in utilizing such computing
infrastructure and handling services on the basis of a difference in their
characteristics remain. This difference in characteristics of services because
of variations in the requirement of computational resources and processes is
termed as service heterogeneity. A potential solution to these issues is the
use of Osmotic Computing -- a recently introduced paradigm that allows division
of services on the basis of their resource usage, based on parameters such as
energy, load, processing time on a data center vs. a network edge resource.
Service provisioning can then be divided across different layers of a
computational infrastructure, from edge devices, in-transit nodes, and a data
center, and supported through an Osmotic software layer. In this paper, a
fitness-based Osmosis algorithm is proposed to provide support for osmotic
computing by making more effective use of existing Fog server resources. The
proposed approach is capable of efficiently distributing and allocating
services by following the principle of osmosis. The results are presented using
numerical simulations demonstrating gains in terms of lower allocation time and
a higher probability of services being handled with high resource utilization.Comment: 7 pages, 4 Figures, International Conference on Communication,
Management and Information Technology (ICCMIT 2017), At Warsaw, Poland, 3-5
April 2017, http://www.iccmit.net/ (Best Paper Award
