Utilization and load balancing in fog servers for health applications

• Published in: EURASIP journal on wireless communications and networking Vol. 2019; no. 1; pp. 1 - 12
• Main Authors: Khattak, Hasan Ali, Arshad, Hafsa, Islam, Saif ul, Ahmed, Ghufran, Jabbar, Sohail, Sharif, Abdullahi Mohamud, Khalid, Shehzad
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 08.04.2019; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Cloud computing; Communications Engineering; Emerging Intelligent Algorithms for Edge-of-Things Computing; Engineering; Fog computing; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Load balancing; Networks; Quality of service; Resource management; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Utilization; Fog computing; Cloud computing; Utilization; Load balancing
• ISSN: 1687-1499; 1687-1472; 1687-1499
• DOI: 10.1186/s13638-019-1395-3

With the evolution of fog computing, processing takes place locally in a virtual platform rather than in a centralized cloud server. Fog computing combined with cloud computing is more efficient as fog computing alone does not serve the purpose. Inefficient resource management and load balancing leads to degradation in quality of service as well as energy losses. Traffic overhead is increased because all the requests are sent to the main server causing delays which cannot be tolerated in healthcare scenarios. To overcome this problem, the authors are consolidating fog computing resources so that requests are handled by foglets and only critical requests are sent to the cloud for processing. Servers are placed locally in each city to handle the nearby requests in order to utilize the resources efficiently along with load balancing among all the servers, which leads to reduced latency and traffic overhead with the improved quality of service.