POMT: Paired Offloading of Multiple Tasks in Heterogeneous Fog Networks

By providing shared and flexible communication, computation, and storage resources along the cloud-to-things continuum, fog computing has become an attractive technology to support delay-sensitive applications in Internet of Things (IoT) and future wireless networks. Consider a typical heterogeneous fog network consisting of different types of fog nodes (FNs), wherein some task nodes (TNs) have computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks, while some helper nodes (HNs) have spare computation resources for sharing with their neighboring nodes. In order to minimize the delay of every task, these TNs and HNs should be effectively associated in a distributed manner, which is the fundamental multi-task multi-helper (MTMH) problem. To tackle this challenging problem, a potential game called paired offloading of multiple tasks (POMT) is formulated and studied. Theoretical analysis proves the existence of the Nash equilibrium (NE) for this proposed game. Further, the corresponding POMT algorithm is developed for every TN to achieve the NE of the general game. The analytical and simulation results show that our POMT algorithm can offer the near-optimal performance in system average delay and delay reduction ratio (DRR), and achieve more number of beneficial TNs, at two orders of magnitude lower complexity than a centralized optimal algorithm for computation offloading.