A Prototype Auction-based Mechanism for Computation Offloading in Fog-cloud Environments

One of the significant issues in fog computing environments is computation offloading. In order to do this process, the communications between the fog and cloud nodes should be investigated. In the literature, a great body of research exists in which the researchers proposed numerous optimization methods regard the subject of offloading in fog networks. These proposals have been implemented taking into account service level agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we propose an optimization method for modeling the interactions of offloading process using rich theory of microeconomics. We model the offloading interactions based on auction mechanism. Then, we modelled and formulated the communications between fog nodes and the cloud entity. Our model takes into account the specifications and limitations of the underlying physical infrastructure such as paths and capacity of each path. These paths are used during computation offloading operations. In our proposed auction economy, the bandwidth of physical links plays the role of the commodity. Finally, the auction is run between the cloud and fog nodes as provider and consumer respectively.