Offloading Optimization with Delay Constraint in the 3-tier Federated Cloud, Edge, and Fog Systems

Mobile edge computing and fog computing are promising techniques providing computation service closer to users to achieve lower latency. In this work, we study the optimal offloading strategy in the three-tier federated computation offloading system. We first present queueing models and closed-form solutions for computing the service delay distribution and the probability of the delay of a task exceeding a given threshold. We then propose an optimal offloading probability algorithm based on the sub-gradient method. Our numerical results show that our simulation results match very well with that of our closed-form solutions, and our sub-gradient-based search algorithm can find the optimal offloading probabilities. Specifically, for the given system parameters, our algorithm yields the optimal QoS violating probability of 0.188 with offloading probabilities of 0.675 and 0.37 from Fog to edge and from edge to cloud, respectively.