GA-IRACE: Genetic Algorithm-Based Improved Resource Aware Cost-Efficient Scheduler for Cloud Fog Computing Environment

The ever-growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices increases the amount of data produced on daily basis. To handle such a massive amount of data, cloud computing provides storage, processing, and analytical services. Besides this, real-time applications, i.e., online gaming, smart traffic management, and smart healthcare, cannot tolerate the high latency and bandwidth consumption. The fog computing paradigm brings the cloud services closer to the network edge to provide quality of service (QoS) to such applications. However, efficient task scheduling becomes critical for improving the performance due to the heterogeneous nature, resource-constrained, and distributed environment of fog resources. With an efficient task scheduling algorithm, the response time to application requests can be reduced along with bandwidth and cloud resource costs. This paper presents a genetic algorithm-based solution to find an efficient scheduling approach for mapping application modules in a cloud fog computing environment. Our proposed solution is based on the execution time as a fitness function to determine an efficient module scheduling on the available fog devices. The proposed approach has been evaluated and compared against baseline algorithms in terms of execution time, monetary cost, and bandwidth. Comprehensive simulation results show that the proposed approach offers a better scheduling strategy than the existing scheduler.