Energy Management in Smart Sectors Using Fog Based Environment and Meta-Heuristic Algorithms

Smart Grid (SG) plays vital role in modern electricity grid. The data is increasing with the drastic increase in number of users. An efficient technology is required to handle this dramatic growth of data. Cloud computing is then used to store the data and to provide numerous services to the consumers. There are various cloud Data Centers (DC), which deal with the requests coming from consumers. However, there is a chance of delay due to the large geographical area between cloud and consumer. So, a concept of fog computing is presented to minimize the delay and to maximize the efficiency. However, the issue of load balancing is raising; as the number of consumers and services provided by fog grow. So, an enhanced mechanism is required to balance the load of fog. In this paper, a three-layered architecture comprising of cloud, fog and consumer layers is proposed. A meta-heuristic algorithm: Improved Particle Swarm Optimization with Levy Walk (IPSOLW) is proposed to balance the load of fog. Consumers send request to the fog servers, which then provide services. Further, cloud is deployed to save the records of all consumers and to provide the services to the consumers, if fog layer is failed. The proposed algorithm is then compared with existing algorithms: genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, binary PSO, cuckoo with levy walk and BAT. Further, service broker policies are used for efficient selection of DC. The service broker policies used in this paper are: closest data center, optimize response time, reconfigure dynamically with load and new advance service broker policy. Moreover, response time and processing time are minimized. The IPSOLW has outperformed to its counterpart algorithms with almost 4.89% better results.