Parallel Meta-Heuristics for Solving Dynamic Offloading in Fog Computing

Abstract

The internet of things (IoT) concept has been extremely investigated in many modern smart applications, which enable a set of sensors to either process the collected data locally or send them to the cloud for remote processing. Unfortunately, cloud datacenters are located far away from IoT devices, and consequently, the transmission of IoT data may be delayed. In this paper, we investigate fog computing, which is a new paradigm that overcomes many issues of cloud computing. More importantly, dynamic task offloading in fog computing is a challenging problem that requires an optimal decision for processing the tasks that are generated in each time slot. Thus, exact optimization methods based on Lyapunov function have been widely used for solving dynamic offloading which represents an NP hard problem. To overcome the scalability issue of exact optimization techniques, we have explored famous population based meta-heuristics for optimizing the offloading process of a set of dynamic tasks using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communication. Hence, a parallel multi-threading framework is proposed for generating the optimal offloading solution while selecting the best sub-carrier for each offloaded task. More importantly, our contribution associates a thread for each IoT device and generates a population of random solutions. Next, each population is updated and evaluated according to the proposed fitness function that considers a tradeoff between the delay and energy consumption. Upon the arrival of new tasks at each time slot, an evaluation is performed for maintaining some individuals of the previous population while generating new individuals based on some criteria. Our results have been compared to the results achieved using Lyapunov optimization. They demonstrate the convergence of the fitness function, the scalability of the parallel Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach, and the performance in terms of the offline error and the execution cost.