Using TOPSIS for Enhancing Service Provisioning Across Fog Environments

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a ubiquitous technology owing to the proliferation of inexpensive smart devices that can provide a wide range of services. As these devices are generally small in size and have limited computational and storage capabilities, it is common that complex or advanced operations shift to the cloud. This makes service provisioning within fog environments challenging particularly as the number of services offering similar functionalities increases at the network edge. Allocating fog resources more efficiently and intelligently becomes essential. In this paper, we present a Fog Service Manager (FSM) framework that provides an optimization technique for allocating fog resources using TOPSIS, a multiple criteria decision-making technique, to enhance the service provisioning across fog environments. Through FSM, it is then possible to optimize the allocation of services based on customized user or device requests. Results from our experiments show that TOPSIS can be used as a reliable and efficient optimization technique for provisioning services across distributed fog environments.