DPTO: A Deadline and Priority-Aware Task Offloading in Fog Computing Framework Leveraging Multilevel Feedback Queueing

By providing the flexible and shared computing and communication resources along with the cloud services, the fog computing became an attractive paradigm to support delay-sensitive tasks in the Internet of Things (IoT). The existing researches for offloading delay-sensitive tasks in a hierarchical fog-cloud environment mostly focused on minimizing the overall communication delay. However, a fair offloading strategy selects a suitable computing device in terms of fog node or cloud server based on the resource requirements of the task while meeting the deadline. In this article, we design a new delay-dependent priority-aware task offloading (DPTO) strategy for scheduling and processing the tasks, generated from the IoT devices to suitable computing devices. The proposed strategy assigns a priority on each task based on its deadline and assigns it to a suitable multilevel-feedback queue. This schema reduces the waiting time of the delay-sensitive tasks on the queue and minimizes the starvation problem of the low priority tasks. Moreover, the DPTO strategy selects an optimal computing device for each task based on its resource availability and transmission time from the IoT device. This strategy minimizes the overall offloading time of the tasks while meeting the deadlines. Finally, the extensive simulation results with various performance parameters show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy over the existing baseline algorithms.