IEEE Access (Jan 2022)
A Survey on Matching Theory for Distributed Computation Offloading in IoT-Fog-Cloud Systems: Perspectives and Open Issues
Abstract
Fog computing has been widely integrated in the IoT-based systems, creating IoT-Fog- Cloud (IFC) systems to improve the system performances and satisfy the quality of services (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) requirements for the end users (EUs). This improvement is enabled by computational offloading schemes, which perform the task computation nearby the task generation sources (i.e., IoT devices, EUs) on behalf of remote cloud servers. To realize the benefits of offloading techniques, however, there is a need to incorporate efficient resource allocation frameworks, which can deal effectively with intrinsic properties of computing environment in the IFC systems such as resource heterogeneity of computing devices, various requirements of computation tasks, high task request rates, and so on. While the centralize optimization and non-cooperative game theory based solutions are applicable in a certain number of application scenarios, they fail to be efficient in many of cases, where the global information and control might be unavailable or cost-intensive to achieve it in the large-scale systems. The need of distributed computational offloading algorithms with low computation complexity has motivated a surge of solutions using matching theory. In the present review, we first describe the fundamental concept of this emerging tool enabling the distributed implementation in the computing environment. Then the key solution concepts and algorithmic implementations proposed in the framework of literature are highlighted and discussed. Given the powerful tool of matching theory, its full capability is still unexplored and unexploited in the literature. We thereby discover and discuss existing challenges and corresponding solutions that the matching theory can be applied to resolve them. Furthermore, new problems and open issues for application scenarios of modern IFC systems are also investigated thoroughly.
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