Distributed application execution in fog computing: A taxonomy, challenges and future directions

• Published in: Journal of King Saud University. Computer and information sciences 2022-07, Vol.34 (7), p.3887-3909
• Main Authors: Ashraf, Maria, Shiraz, Muhammad, Abbasi, Almas, Albahli, Saleh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Application partitioning; Distributed application execution; Fog computing; Mobile edge computing; Task allocation; Task execution; Task resumption
• ISSN: 1319-1578; 2213-1248
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jksuci.2022.05.002

•A taxonomy discussing application execution strategies in fog computing.•A comprehensive discussion about components of application execution in fog computing.•Critical analysis providing in detail information about key aspects of application execution strategies.•Identifying research gaps and highlight new research directions which needs to be addressed in the future. With tremendous advancements in smart phone industry and IoT devices, edge computing has emerged to provide computational services at edge of the network. As a result, applications can be executed in a distributive manner to meet the latency requirements of applications. Despite these advancements, these devices are still considered to have limited energy, memory and computational resources compared to stationary standalone devices. Mobile edge computing extends mobile cloud computing close to end-users, decreasing latency and bandwidth utilisation by offloading tasks to edge servers. Fog computing places nodes between cloud and edge servers. A challenging approach in these paradigms is establishing offloading decision to edge/fog server, and distributed application execution at run time for heterogeneous devices. This paper reviews execution of resource-intensive tasks on mobile devices in distributed frameworks. The objective is to identify research gaps and highlight new research directions that can be pursued in future. Application execution involves application partitioning, task allocation, task execution and task resumption. In this paper, we propose a separate taxonomy for each step in application execution, reviews state-of-the-art techniques, and analyses critical aspects of application execution in a distributed manner. It further investigates similarities and differences among these techniques based on each step of application execution.