Scalable Service Placement in the Fog Computing Environment for the IoT-Based Smart City

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the main enablers for situation awareness needed in accomplishing smart cities. IoT devices, especially for monitoring purposes, have stringent timing requirements which may not be met by cloud computing. This deficiency of cloud computing can be overcome by fog computing for which fog nodes are placed close to IoT devices. Because of low capabilities of fog nodes compared to cloud data centers, fog nodes may not be deployed with all the services required by IoT devices. Thus, in this article, we focus on the issue of fog service placement and present the recent research trends in this issue. Most of the literature on fog service placement deals with determining an appropriate fog node satisfying the various requirements like delay from the perspective of one or more service requests. In this article, we aim to effectively place fog services in accordance with the pre-obtained service demands, which may have been collected during the prior time interval, instead of on-demand service placement for one or more service requests. The concept of the logical fog network is newly presented for the sake of the scalability of fog service placement in a large-scale smart city. The logical fog network is formed in a tree topology rooted at the cloud data center. Based on the logical fog network, a service placement approach is proposed so that services can be placed on fog nodes in a resource-effective way.