Optimization of mobile device energy consumption in a fog-based mobile computing offloading mechanism

The offloading of computing tasks to the fog computing system is a promising approach to reduce the response time of resource-greedy real-time mobile applications. Besides the decreasing of the response time, the offloading mechanisms may reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices. In the paper, we focused on the analysis of the energy consumption of mobile devices that use fog computing infrastructure to increase the overall system performance and to improve the battery life. We consider a three-layer computing architecture, which consists of the mobile device itself, a fog node, and a remote cloud. The tasks are processed locally or offloaded according to the threshold-based offloading criterion. We have formulated an optimization problem that minimizes the energy consumption under the constraints on the average response time and the probability that the response time is lower than a certain threshold. We also provide the numerical solution to the optimization problem and discuss the numerical results.