Improving the Schedulability of Real-Time Tasks Using Fog Computing.

Due to the significant communication delay to user tasks, the cloud is not ideal for executing real-time tasks with stringent deadlines. Fog computing consists of low computation capability fog nodes, or cloudlets located in proximity to the source of the data generation: the users. These cloudlets are ideal for executing tasks that have early deadlines. In this paper, we propose algorithms that schedule a set of real-time tasks on such an embedded-fog-cloud architecture. We consider hard, firm and soft tasks. The execution framework consists of embedded, fog and cloud processors. Tasks are scheduled on appropriate processors based on their deadline requirements. In general, hard real-time tasks are executed on embedded processors, firm real-time tasks on fog processors, and soft real-time tasks on cloud processors. We also propose a sufficient schedulability condition. Simulation results from the CERIT trace as well as test-bed results show that the proposed algorithms offer superior performance as compared to algorithms that do not employ fog processors. Employing an $Embedded-fog-cloud$ E m b e d d e d - f o g - c l o u d architecture offers an improvement of 62.37 percent for real-time Success Ratio (SR) and 35 percent for Average Response Time as compared to scheduling tasks on the $cloud$ c l o u d alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]