A replication and migration strategy on the hierarchical architecture in the fog computing environment

Connecting objects have increasingly become popular in recent years, leading to the connection of more than 50 billion objects by the end of 2020. This large number of objects will generate a huge amount of data that is currently being processed and stored in the cloud. Fog Computing presents a promising solution to the problems of high latency and huge network traffic encountered in the cloud. As Fog’s infrastructures are dense, heterogeneous and geo-distributed, managing the data in order to satisfy users demand in such context is very complicated. In this work, we propose a data management strategy called ‘RMS-HaFC’ in which we consider the characteristics of Fog Computing environment. To do so, we proposed a hierarchical multi-layer model, on which we designed a migration and replication strategy based on data popularity. These strategies duplicate files dynamically and store them in different locations to improve the response time of users requests and minimize the system energy consumption without loading network usage. The strategy was evaluated using the iFogSim simulator and the experimental results obtained are very promising.