An efficient data replication and load balancing technique for fog computing environment

The technological environment is a competitive ground used by IT industries for provisioning Cloud services. It is essential for the organizations to facilitate higher availability of quality services, computing resources and faster delivery. Fog computing can work with much the same Cloud computing in promoting faster IT services. The incorporation looks after affording, maintaining and provisioning of resources like storage space, hardware virtualization, high-capacity networks, service-oriented architectures, autonomic and utility computing etc, proximal to the access point. The maximal uniform distribution of the load across closer and more number of simpler nodes can help managing and providing the big data and large workloads more easily. The paper proposes an efficient load balancing algorithm for a Fog-Cloud based architecture. The algorithm uses data replication technique for maintaining data in Fog networks which reduces overall dependency on big data centers. A comparison of present load balancing techniques in ‘Cloud-based’ infrastructure to the presented ‘Cloud-Fog’ duo is also shown. The ultimate goal is to balance load through Fog networks and make internet less Cloud dependent by having data available closer to the user end.