OptiFog: A Framework for Acquiring State Information and Predicting Resource Availability for Task Offloading in Cooperative Fog-Networks

The primary objective of fog computing is to minimize the reliance of IoT devices on the cloud by leveraging the resources of fog network. Typically, IoT devices offload computation tasks to fog to meet different task requirements such as latency in task execution, computation costs, etc. So, selecting such a fog node that meets task requirements is a crucial challenge. To choose an optimal fog node, access to each node's resource availability information is essential. Existing approaches often assume state availability or depend on a subset of state information to design mechanisms tailored to different task requirements. In this paper,
OptiFog:
a cluster-based fog computing architecture for acquiring the state information followed by optimal fog node selection and task offloading mechanism is proposed. Additionally, a continuous time Markov chain based stochastic model for predicting the resource availability on fog nodes is proposed. This model prevents the need to frequently synchronize the resource availability status of fog nodes, and allows to maintain an updated state information. Extensive simulation results show that
OptiFog
lowers task execution latency considerably, and schedules almost all the tasks at the fog layer compared to the existing state-of-the-art.