Optimisation of Volunteer Node Selection for Scalable and Trustworthy Fog Environments

In the landscape of modern computing, fog computing has emerged as a service provisioning mechanism that addresses the dual demands of low latency and service localisation. Fog architecture consists of a network of interconnected nodes that work collectively to execute tasks and process data in a localised area, thereby reducing the delay induced from communication with the cloud. However, a key issue associated with fog service provisioning models is its limited localised processing capability and storage relative to the cloud, thereby presenting inherent issues on its scalability. In this paper, we propose volunteer computing coupled with optimisation methods to address the issue of localised fog scalability. The use of optimisation methods ensures the optimal use of fog infrastructure. To scale the fog network as per the requirements, we leverage the notion of volunteer computing. We propose an intelligent approach for node selection in a trustworthy fog environment to satisfy the performance and bandwidth requirements of the fog network. The problem is formulated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem where nodes are evaluated and ranked based on several factors, including service level agreement (SLA) parameters and reputation value.