An Auction-Based Mechanism for Task Offloading in Fog Networks

With the rapid growth of terminal equipments, the data traffic in the network has grown exponentially. In order to relieve the pressure of cloud computing on link delay, congestion and energy consumption, the promising fog computing is proposed. The fog network consists of several fog clusters. We consider a fog cluster in which a fog controller (FC) aims to schedule the idle fog nodes (FNs) to serve the task node (TN) while guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the TN. We design an ascending-bid auction mechanism to achieve this goal. In this mechanism, the FC is the auctioneer with the reward prices as its strategy and the FNs play the role of bidders with the task sizes as their strategies. The FC uses the bid prices to motivate the FNs to process more data for the TN. The utility function of FNs is proposed, considering the payment from the FC, the cost of task computational delay and energy consumption. The FNs determine the data sizes to be processed by maximizing their utilities. Numerical simulations indicate the satisfactory performance and verify the theoretical analysis, thereby our proposed mechanism results in a win-win solution under the condition of meeting the QoS.