Availability-Aware Service Placement Policy in Fog Computing Based on Graph Partitions

Fog computing extends the cloud to where things are by placing applications closer to the users and Internet of Things devices. The placement of those applications, or their services, has an important influence on the performance of the fog architecture. Improving the availability and the latency of the applications is a challenging task due to the complexity of this type of distributed system. In this paper, we propose a service placement policy inspired by complex networks. We are able to increase the service availability and the quality of service (QoS) satisfaction rate by first mapping applications to communities of fog devices and then transitively placing the services of the applications on the fog devices of the community. The underlying idea is to place as many interrelated services as possible in the devices closest to the users. We compare our solution with an integer linear programming approach, and the simulation results show that our proposal obtains improved QoS satisfaction and service availability.