How to place your apps in the fog: State of the art and open challenges

Abstract

Fog computing aims at extending the cloud towards the Internet of things so to achieve improved quality of service and to empower latency-sensitive and bandwidth-hungry applications. The fog calls for novel models and algorithms to distribute multiservice applications in such a way that data processing occurs wherever it is best placed, based on both functional and non-functional requirements. This survey reviews the existing methodologies to solve the application placement problem in the fog, while pursuing three main objectives. First, it offers a comprehensive overview on the currently employed algorithms, on the availability of open-source prototypes and on the size of test use cases. Second, it classifies the literature based on the application and fog infrastructure characteristics that are captured by available models, with a focus on the considered constraints and the optimized metrics. Finally, it identifies some open challenges in application placement in the fog.