Energy Minimized Federated Fog Computing over Passive Optical Networks

The rapid growth of time-sensitive applications and services has driven enhancements to computing infrastructures. The main challenge that needs addressing for these applications is the optimal placement of the end-users’ demands to reduce the total power consumption and delay. One of the widely adopted paradigms to address such a challenge is fog computing. Placing fog units close to end-users at the edge of the network can help mitigate some of the latency and energy efficiency issues. Compared to the traditional hyperscale cloud data centres, fog computing units are constrained by computational power, hence, the capacity of fog units plays a critical role in meeting the stringent demands of the end-users due to intensive processing workloads. In this paper, we first propose a federated fog computing architecture where multiple distributed fog cells collaborate in serving users. These fog cells are connected through dedicated Passive Optical Network (PON) connections. We then aim to optimize the placement of virtual machines (VMs) demands originating from the end-users by formulating a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to minimize the total power consumption. The results show an increase in processing capacity and a reduction in the power consumption by up to 26% compared to a Non-Federated fogs computing architecture.