Hybrid algorithm for cloud-fog system based load balancing in smart grids

Energy management is among the key components of smart metering. Its role is to balance energy consumption and distribution. Smart devices integration results in a huge data exchange between different parts of the smart grid causing a delay in the response and processing time. To overcome this latency issue, the cloud computing has been proposed. However, cloud computing does not perform well when there are large distances from the cloud to the consumers. Fog computing solves this issue. In this paper, a cloud-fog computing system is presented to achieve an accurate load balancing. The hybridization of whale optimization algorithm with bat algorithm (WOA-BAT) is proposed for load balancing. The model performance is compared to state of art load balancing techniques as throttled, round robin, whale and particle swarm optimization algorithms in terms of processing and the response time. The results reveal that the proposed WOA-BAT has better results in terms of response time than the three algorithms with 4.3% improvement compared to RR and TH. It also outperforms all the algorithms in terms of processing time by at least 22.3%