Container-based fog computing architecture and energy-balancing scheduling algorithm for energy IoT

The traditional architecture of fog computing is for one data center and multiple fog nodes. It is unable to adapt to the current development of private cloud. In addition, virtual machines used for cloud computing, are also used for fog computing as the resource unit, cannot satisfy the requirement of fog computing. Furthermore, the limited capacity of battery power has been one of the major constraints when considering cloud-to-fog-to-sensor pattern in the scenario of Energy Internet. We propose a multi-cloud to multi-fog architecture and design two kinds of service models by employing containers to improve the resource utilization of fog nodes and reduce the service delay. According to the two service models, we present a task scheduling algorithm for energy balancing. The algorithm is based on the transmission energy consumption of terminal devices and uses a dynamic threshold strategy to schedule requests in real time, thereby guaranteeing the energy balancing of terminal devices without increasing the transmission delay. Experimental results show that our proposed service models and scheduling algorithm can reduce service latency, improve fog node efficiency, and prolong WSNs life cycle through energy balancing.