Optimal placement of applications in the fog environment: A systematic literature review

The fog-computing paradigm complements cloud computing to support the deployment and execution of latency-sensitive applications at the network edge by offering enhanced computational power. Optimal placement of such applications over a fog network comprising geographically distributed, heterogeneous, and resource-constrained fog nodes is a core challenge in fog-computing paradigm research. This study systematically reviews existing research on optimal fog application placement over the cloud-to-thing continuum. Surveyed articles are analyzed in four aspects: i) layers of the cloud-to-thing continuum considered for placing an application; ii) application characteristics that are considered in making placement decisions; iii) application placement mechanism; iv) tools and technology for placing an application. This review also categorizes the research problems associated with fog application placement. Finally, based on this review, we suggest directions for future adaptive fog-application placement research.