Computation Offloading for Smart Devices in Fog-Cloud Queuing System

Advancements in sensor and hardware technology have surged the growth of smart devices (SDs), including smartphones, and wearable devices. The data generated by the built-in sensors are utilized by different applications such as health-care, smart-city, and connected-vehicles. However, due to the computation and energy limitations of the SDs, they often need to offload the computation-intensive tasks for processing to the remote server. The cloud-based offloading can meet various applications’ demands, but due to high network latency, it is inefficient for real-time applications. Fog computing provides an alternative for the same, as it aggregates the fog nodes’ resources at the edge of the network to meet the computational requirements of the real-time applications. In this paper, we consider a Fog-Cloud architecture consisting of multiple SDs, fog nodes, and the cloud. We use appropriate queuing models to simulate the traffic delay at different network elements and formulate a non-linear multi-objective optimization problem to minimize the energy consumption, execution delay, and cost of remote execution. Finally, the Stochastic Gradient descent (SGD) algorithm based solution approach is proposed that jointly optimizes offloading probability and transmission power to find the optimal trade-off between the offloading objectives. Simulation results show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed system validated by the results.