A Novel Nature-Inspired Algorithm for Optimal Task Scheduling in Fog–Cloud Blockchain System

In recent years, the utilization of fog cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications has been steadily rising due to the exponential growth of data produced by interconnected smart devices. However, cloud providers who are responsible for these IoT applications face two critical problems: 1) how to protect the system from untrusted users and 2) how to allocate processing units to meet the demands with acceptable costs. The fog–cloud blockchain system (FCB), proposed in past research, provides a perfect solution for the former question by integrating Blockchain’s security qualities into the fog–cloud paradigm. In this article, we address the latter question by proposing an improved version of the life-choice-based optimization algorithm (ILCO) to solve the task scheduling for Bag-of-Task applications in the FCB system. Task scheduling is one of the most prominent problems in resource allocation. Our proposed algorithm not only increases the convergence speed but also maintains diversity better, optimizing the FCB’s power, latency, and cost. Under a single-objective problem setting, ILCO outperforms LCO and similar state-of-the-art methods by achieving better results for FCB’s latency and power consumption.