Energy Efficient Resource Allocation for Demand Intensive Applications in a VLC Based Fog Architecture

In this paper, we propose an energy efficient passive optical network (PON) architecture for backhaul connectivity in indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems. The proposed network is used to support a fog computing architecture designed to allow users with processing demands to access dedicated fog nodes and idle processing resources in other user devices (UDs) within the same building. The fog resources within a building complement fog nodes at the access and metro networks and the central cloud data center. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to minimize the total power consumption associated with serving demands over the proposed architecture. A scenario that considers applications with intensive demands is examined to evaluate the energy efficiency of the proposed architecture. A comparison is conducted between allocating the demands in the fog nodes and serving the demands in the conventional cloud data center. Additionally, the proposed architecture is compared with an architecture based on state-of-art Spine-and-Leaf (SL) connectivity. Relative to the SL architecture and serving all the demands in the cloud, the adoption of the PON-based architecture achieves 84% and 86% reductions, respectively.