Mobility-aware Task Offloading in Fog-Assisted Networks

In a fog-computing assisted Internet of Things network, end-devices typically offload computation and storage-intensive tasks to fog devices. It is primarily done to meet the latency requirements of tasks, and QoS requirements of the network. In addition to providing localized computing and storage services, the fog network also needs to support end-device mobility while handling offloaded tasks, especially, to mimic the ubiquitous availability of the cloud. Most of the existing works in this direction either recommend task migration or offloading tasks by predicting the device's location. Both these approaches are shown to have their respective limitations, and, thus a mobility-aware task offloading scheme is crucial to meet end-device task requirements. In this paper, we present an approach to handle the mobility of end-devices for effectively handling offloaded tasks. The proposed mechanism is simple, effective, and is not constrained by a device's location, thereby lowering the costs associated with mobility. Especially, the proposed scheme entirely eliminates the cost induced during migration, since effective task offloading can lessen the necessity to attempt task migrations. The simulation result of the proposed scheme reduces execution latency by 44%, saves upto 68% of network usage and 62% of computational cost at the cloud compared to the state-of - the-art.