Application-Specific Service Function Chain Provisioning in Heterogeneous Fog Networks

Cloud architectures provide abundant resources, albeit with prolonged link delays. Meanwhile, fog architectures provide limited resources at the expense of limited resources. Hence, hybrid fog-cloud solutions have been proposed to combine the benefits of both architectures. However, users demand low latency and high processing still cannot be accommodated using the hybrid model. Therefore, this paper presents a heterogeneous single-tier fog architecture suitable for data-intensive and delaysensitive requests, which represents the worst-case scenario for the type of incoming requests from the network perspective. Moreover, an efficient service function chain provisioning scheme is implemented here on the proposed architecture. The scheme leverages coordinated generalized pattern search algorithm and yields reduced network delays and energy consumption as opposed to the hybrid solution.