Novel Load Balancing Technique for Microservice-Based Fog Healthcare Environment

Fog computing originated from cloud computing. It provides a distributed environment for providing services to mobile users having heterogeneous configurations. Microservice is an efficient mechanism to subdivide the tasks of an application in a distributed environment. Load balancing in microservice environment is a challenge with heterogeneous fog devices and end devices. As it is important to make sure neither of the fog nodes should be overloaded nor underloaded to utilise the potential of the fog environment. In this paper, a novel approach for handling the load in a microservice-based healthcare application in fog environment has been presented. Load balancing is performed on the basis of parameters which are getting updated after the successful execution of requested microservice which will serve as a feedback mechanism to handle failures in microservices while ensuring load balancing in fog environment. The proposed technique, when Simulated on iFogSim2 simulator resulted in considerable better throughput and reduced execution time which are key parameters for determining the performance of load balancing algorithm.