Joint Cloudlet Selection and Latency Minimization in Fog Networks

Mobile edge or fog computing is a network architecture that brings the functionality of conventional centralized cloud to the edge nodes, which are in close proximity of the end devices in an Internet of Things (IoT) network. Fog networks have many advantages over traditional cloud networks, such as increased bandwidth utilization, enhanced security and privacy, better energy efficiency, improved performance, and support for mobility. The most critical requirement of a fog architecture is to minimize the end to end latency in IoT networks, particularly in scenarios where large number of end devices (IoT nodes) and distributed computing fog nodes (cloudlets) are present. In this paper, we formulated an optimization problem for joint cloudlet selection and latency minimization in a fog network, subjected to maximum work load and latency constraints. The problem can be epitomized as many-to-one matching game in which IoT nodes and cloudlets rank each other in order to minimize the latency. The proposed game belongs to a class of matching games with externalities. We propose an algorithm to solve this game which gives distributed and self-organizing solution. Extensive simulations have been carried out to validate the proposed algorithm.