Balanced Computing Offloading for Selfish IoT Devices in Fog Computing

Fog computing, which provides low-latency computing services at the network edge, is an enabler for the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Offloading tasks to the fog that is closer to IoT users for processing has become a means to ensure that tasks are completed quickly. Fog computing cannot only reduce the congestion of the backbone network but also ensure that the task is completed within the specified time. Since fog resources are limited, there will be resource competition among IoT devices. How to quickly and efficiently make an optimal computation offloading decision for individual selfish IoT devices is a fundamental research issue. This article regards the process of multiple IoT devices competing for fog devices as a game and proposes a distributed computation offloading algorithm. The goal is to optimize the balance of computation delay, energy consumption, and cost for fog nodes. The competition between IoT nodes eventually reaches an equilibrium point, that is the Nash equilibrium point. We prove the existence of Nash equilibrium by Weighted Potential Game. In addition, if a large number of IoT devices select the same node for offloading, which will cause the fog node to run out of power and make some networks unable to work normally. Further, causing part of the network to be paralyzed. Therefore, the paper considers the fairness of offloading to extend the network life cycle. A calculation rate adjustment algorithm is designed for the fairness of offloading to ensure that fog nodes do not run out of power and fail. This paper not only fully considers the performance of the IoT device, but also considers the fairness of the fog. Numerous experiments proved the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.