Service Placement for Latency Reduction in the Fog Using Application Profiles

The Cloud-Fog-Internet of Things continuum combines different paradigms to provide connectivity and ubiquity for end-users, while also granting low latency and low jitter to cope with different challenges, including the requirements of latency-sensitive applications, such as virtual/augmented reality and online gaming. This constitutes a complex and dynamic environment with heterogeneous resources that need to be managed or orchestrated, in order to accomplish application requirements for low latency. Common orchestration solutions make placement decisions based only on the resources of the underlying network and the application resource requests; however, using the profiles of applications to make placement decisions has the potential to enhance the final performance perceived by the end-users. This paper proposes the use of application profiles according to their popularity to guide their placement. To corroborate the effectiveness of the use of the profiles, two placement mechanisms are presented, one based on Genetic Algorithm and the other inspired on graph partitions. Simulation results show that it is possible to reduce the latency and jitter of applications via a service placement guided by the profiles. The mechanism based on graph partitions showed better results for all scenarios, followed closely by the Genetic Algorithm in the scenarios with lower load.