Stable federated fog formation: An evolutionary game theoretical approach

Instability within fog federations is considered as a serious problem that degrades the performance of the provided services. The latter may affect the service availability due to fog providers withdrawing their resources. It may either lead to failures for some users invocations, or to an increase in the number of tasks inside the servers’ processing-queue. Such a critical problem strips the fog paradigm from its main characteristic, the low latency factor. As far as we are aware, no work in the literature has addressed the problem of encountering unstable fog federations. Their main concerns were increasing the providers’ payoff regardless of their behavior. To address the aforementioned limitation, this work studies the stability of the federations through modeling the problem as an evolutionary game-theoretical model. Moreover, it devises a decentralized algorithm that implants the Replicator Dynamics model within which expresses the evolutionary dynamics. Experiments are conducted using EUA Datasets to simulate our algorithm and to show that it leads to an evolutionarily stable strategy over time, which stabilizes the federations and improves the Quality-of-Service for the users.