Computing resource allocation in three-tier IoT fog networks: a joint optimization approach combining Stackelberg game and matching

Fog computing is a promising architecture to provide economical and low latency data services for future Internet of Things (IoT)-based network systems. Fog computing relies on a set of low-power fog nodes (FNs) that are located close to the end users to offload the services originally targeting at cloud data centers. In this paper, we consider a specific fog computing network consisting of a set of data service operators (DSOs) each of which controls a set of FNs to provide the required data service to a set of data service subscribers (DSSs). How to allocate the limited computing resources of FNs to all the DSSs to achieve an optimal and stable performance is an important problem. Therefore, we propose a joint optimization framework for all FNs, DSOs, and DSSs to achieve the optimal resource allocation schemes in a distributed fashion. In the framework, we first formulate a Stackelberg game to analyze the pricing problem for the DSOs as well as the resource allocation problem for the DSSs. Under the scenarios that the DSOs can know the expected amount of resource purchased by the DSSs, a many-to-many matching game is applied to investigate the pairing problem between DSOs and FNs. Finally, within the same DSO, we apply another layer of many-to-many matching between each of the paired FNs and serving DSSs to solve the FN-DSS pairing problem. Simulation results show that our proposed framework can significantly improve the performance of the IoT-based network systems

Optimal Resource Allocation in Ultra-low Power Fog-computing SWIPT-based Networks

In this paper, we consider a fog computing system consisting of a multi-antenna access point (AP), an ultra-low power (ULP) single antenna device and a fog server. The ULP device is assumed to be capable of both energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding (ID) using a time-switching simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) scheme. The ULP device deploys the harvested energy for ID and either local computing or offloading the computations to the fog server depending on which strategy is most energy efficient. In this scenario, we optimize the time slots devoted to EH, ID and local computation as well as the time slot and power required for the offloading to minimize the energy cost of the ULP device. Numerical results are provided to study the effectiveness of the optimized fog computing system and the relevant challenges