Fog following me: Latency and quality balanced task allocation in vehicular fog computing

Abstract

Emerging vehicular applications, such as real-time situational awareness and cooperative lane change, demand for sufficient computing resources at the edge to conduct time-critical and data-intensive tasks. This paper proposes Fog Following Me (Folo), a novel solution for latency and quality balanced task allocation in vehicular fog computing. Folo is designed to support the mobility of vehicles, including ones generating tasks and the others serving as fog nodes. We formulate the process of task allocation across stationary and mobile fog nodes into a joint optimization problem, with constraints on service latency, quality loss, and fog capacity. As it is a NP-hard problem, we linearize it and solve it using Mixed Integer Linear Programming. To evaluate the effectiveness of Folo, we simulate the mobility of fog nodes at different times of day based on real-world taxi traces, and implement two representative tasks, including video streaming and real-time object recognition. Compared with naive and random fog node selection, the latency and quality balanced task allocation provided by Folo achieves higher performance. More specifically, Folo shortens the average service latency by up to 41% while reducing the quality loss by up to 60%.