A Decentralized Multiagent-Based Task Scheduling Framework for Handling Uncertain Events in Fog Computing

Fog computing has become an attractive research topic in recent years. As anextension of the cloud, fog computing provides computing resources for Internetof Things (IoT) applications through communicative fog nodes located at thenetwork edge. Fog nodes assist cloud services in handling real-time and mobileapplications by bringing the processing capability to where the data isgenerated. However, the introduction of fog nodes can increase schedulingopenness and uncertainty. The scheduling issues in fog computing need toconsider the geography, load balancing, and network latency between IoTdevices, fog nodes, as well as the parent cloud. Besides, the schedulingmethods also need to deal with the occurrence of uncertain events in real-timeso as to ensure service reliability. This paper proposes an agent-basedframework with a decentralized structure to construct the architecture of fogcomputing, while three agent-based algorithms are proposed to implement thescheduling, load balance, and rescheduling processes. The proposed framework isimplemented by JADE and evaluated on the iFogSim toolkit. Experimental resultsshow that the proposed scheduling framework can adaptively schedule tasks andresources for different service requests in fog computing and can also improvethe task success rate when uncertain events occur.