Cooperation for Distributed Task Offloading in Fog Computing Networks

Abstract

Undoubtedly, fog computing enables data processing and storage close to IoT devices to provide improved IoT services on behalf of centralized cloud computing. The exploitation of fog computing resources is still ineffective, though, because these heterogeneous devices are distributed in space and time in many scenarios, thus causing an uneven load on the fog nodes. Many large tasks such as virtual reality and machine learning-based tasks must be executed by the remote cloud servers since the fog nodes have insufficient resources to handle them. However, these large tasks can be completed in a distributed manner at various fog nodes if they can be divided into independent subtasks. The advances in technologies such as hardware, software, and in the field of information and communication enable the different fog nodes to communicate together, thus potentially facilitating the distributed computing solution at fog. This chapter reviews proposed approaches to examine that fog-fog cooperation can help to improve the performance of task offloading operations in the fog environment.