Towards cost-efficient resource provisioning with multiple mobile users in fog computing

Fog computing is an emerging paradigm that brings computing capabilities closer to distributed IoT devices, which provides networking services between end devices and traditional cloud data centers. One important mission is to further reduce the monetary cost of fog resources while meeting the ever-growing demands of multiple users. In this paper, we focus on minimizing the total cost for multiple mobile users to provide an efficient resource provisioning scheme in fog computing. The total cost includes two aspects: the replication cost and the transmission cost. We consider three cases for the resource provision problem by focusing on different cost models. First, one simple case where users can only upload one replication is discussed, and an optimal solution is proposed by converting the original problem into a bipartite graph matching. Then we consider a more complicated case in which each user can upload multiple replications on fog nodes in the resource provisioning. Specifically, two models are discussed: the 0–1 transmission cost model and the different transmission cost model. For the 0–1 transmission cost model, each user can upload multiple replications with a constant transmission cost, and one optimal greedy solution is proposed. For the different transmission cost model, the transmission cost is related to the distance of each pair of fog nodes. This problem is proven to be NP-hard. We first propose a non-adaptive algorithm which is proved to be bounded by [Formula presented]. Another 3+ϵ-approximation algorithm is proposed based on local search, which has better performance with higher complexity. Extensive simulations also prove the efficiency of our schemes.