Optimal Distribution of Workloads in Cloud-Fog Architecture in Intelligent Vehicular Networks

With the fast growth in network-connected vehicular devices, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has many advances in terms of size and speed for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. As a result, the amount of produced data and computational loads has increased intensely. A solution to handle the vast volume of workload has been traditionally cloud computing such that a substantial delay is encountered in the processing of workload, and this has made a serious challenge in the ITS management and workload distribution. Processing a part of workloads at the edge-systems of the vehicular network can reduce the processing delay while striking energy restrictions by migrating the mission of handling workloads from powerful servers of the cloud to the edge systems with limited computing resources at the same time. Therefore, a fair distribution method is required that can evenly distribute the workloads between the powerful data centers and the light computing systems at the edge of the vehicular network. In this paper, a kind of Genetic Algorithm (GA) is exploited to optimize the power consumption of edge systems and reduce delays in the processing of workloads simultaneously. By considering the battery depreciation, the supporting power supply, and the delay, the proposed method can distribute the workloads more evenly between cloud and fog servers so that the processing delay decreases significantly. Also, in comparison with the existing methods, the proposed algorithm performs significantly better in both using green energy for recharging the fog server batteries and reducing the delay in processing data.