Towards Fog Network Utility Maximization (FoNUM) for Managing Fog Computing Resources

Abstract

Fog computing is an emerging architecture, which extends the Cloud computing paradigm to the edge of the network, enabling new applications and services, including Internet of Things (IoT). End users have certain computation tasks, which can be completed either locally on the end device or remotely on an accessible Fog node via computation offloading. Due to mobility and highly dynamic nature of end users, the access is wireless with severe physical limitations on the access network capacity to sustain stringent latency requirements for streaming and real-time applications for large number of end users over wide-spread geographical area. Also, computationally and storage intensive tasks can be offloaded to centralized cloud over IP core network at the cost of higher communication delay. Efficiency of offloading critically depends not only on the wireless access to Fog nodes, but also on availability of the computing, storage, control, and networking resources at the Fog nodes. This position paper proposes Fog Network Utility Maximization (FoNUM) for balancing end user preferences for various Fog services with mobile end user preferences for conserving battery energy to prolong battery lives. We suggest that approximate, pricing-based, distributed solution to FoNUM can be obtained by employing soft handoff, which allows peripheral devices to connect to several “close” Fog nodes and then customize the offloading depending on the specific task resource requirements and resource availability at the Fog nodes.