Collaborative AI Enabled Intelligent Partial Service Provisioning in Green Industrial Fog Networks

With the evolutionary development of the latency-sensitive industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) applications, delay restriction becomes a critical challenge, which can be resolved by distributing IIoT applications on nearby fog devices. Besides that, efficient service provisioning and energy optimization are confronting serious challenges with the ongoing expansion of large-scale IIoT applications. However, due to insufficient resource availability, a single fog device cannot execute large-scale applications completely. In such a scenario, a partial service provisioning strategy provides a promising outcome to enable the services on multiple fog devices or collaboration with cloud servers. By motivating this scenario, in this article, we introduce a new deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-enabled partial service provisioning strategy in the green industrial fog networks. With this strategy, multiple fog devices share the excessive workload of an application among themselves. To reflect this, a task partitioning policy is introduced to partition the requested applications into a set of independent or interdependent tasks. Furthermore, we develop an intelligent partial service provisioning strategy to utilize maximum fog resources in the network. The experimental results express the significance of the proposed strategy over the traditional baseline algorithms in terms of energy consumption and latency up to 25% and 16%, respectively.