Efficient Pareto based approach for IoT task offloading on Fog–Cloud environments

In recent times, a new paradigm has emerged in the field of Cloud computing, namely Fog computing. This paradigm has proven to be highly useful in a wide range of domains where both delay and cost were important metrics. Notably, the Internet of Things (IoT) strongly benefits from this, as small devices can gain access to strong computation power quickly and at a low cost. To achieve this, task offloading is used to decide which task should be executed on which node. The development of an efficient algorithm to address this problem could significantly enhance the sustainability of systems in various industrial, agricultural, autonomous vehicle, and other domains. This paper proposes a new variant of the Niche Pareto Genetic Algorithm (NPGA) called Local search Drafting-NPGA (LD-NPGA) to optimize resource allocation in a Cloud/Fog environment, with the objective of minimizing makespan and cost simultaneously. It generates Pareto solutions allowing the user to make choices closer to its intentions. Thus, it addresses various shortcomings identified in the state of the art, including scalability and aggregation formula. A drafting step is implemented to maintain diversity in the population of solutions, resulting in a more varied Pareto set than basic NPGA. LD-NPGA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art metaheuristics in makespan and cost by 15%. Finally, the scalability of our approach and the variety of solutions generated are confirmed in the different experiments.