E‐TOALB: An efficient task offloading in IoT‐fog networks

Abstract

SummarySmart devices are concerned about the processing and computation of tasks due to their tiny nature. They prefer to offload their tasks to the cloud for processing and computation. Due to the huge amount of data being generated by smart devices, the cloud becomes inefficient in terms of huge delay. Thus, Processing tasks in the cloud can add latency and finally needs to be addressed. Thus, fog computing is an alternative to the latency issue. The tasks are offloaded to fog instead of the cloud. In this paper, e‐TOALB (enhanced task offloading and load balancing), a modified and enhanced nature‐inspired and meta‐heuristic ant colony optimization is used to offload tasks in a fog environment. The results obtained by the proposed method are compared with Particle swarm optimization (PSO), round robin (RR), and ant colony optimization. The numerical results clearly show an improvement in average response time and load sharing among all fog nodes. The results of the proposed model produce low response time, low average service time, and low standard deviation. The proposed scheme aims to find the best possible decision for offloading tasks to nearby fog devices and to find an optimal route for offloading with the least communication cost and average service time.