A Residual Resource Fitness-Based Genetic Algorithm for a Fog-Level Virtual Machine Placement for Green Smart City Services

Energy efficient information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure at all levels of a city’s edifice constitutes a core requirement within the sustainable development goals. The ICT infrastructure of smart cities can be considered in three levels, namely the cloud layer infrastructure, devices/sensing layer infrastructure, and fog layer infrastructure at the edge of the network. Efficiency of a data-centre’s energy infrastructure is significantly affected by the placement of virtual machines (VMs) within the data-centre facility. This research establishes the virtual machine (VM) placement problem as an optimisation problem, and due to its adaptability for such complicated search issues, this paper applies the genetic algorithm (GA) towards the VM placement problem solution. When allocating or reallocating a VM, there is a large quantity of unused resources that might be used, however these resources are inefficiently spread over several different active physical machines (PMs). This study aims to increase the data-centre’s efficiency in terms of both energy usage and time spent on maintenance, and introduces a novel fitness function to streamline the process of computing the fitness function in GAs, which is the most computationally intensive component in a GA. A standard GA and first fit decreasing GA (FFD-GA) are applied on benchmark datasets to compare their relative performances. Experimental results obtained using data from Google data-centres demonstrate that the proposed FFD-GA saves around 8% more energy than a standard GA while reducing the computational overhead by approximately 66%.