Energy Savings by Task Offloading to a Fog Considering Radio Front-End Characteristics

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the energy efficiency of offloading IoT tasks to fog computing considering radio front-end characteristics, highlighting the conditions under which fog offloading saves energy.

Contribution

It introduces detailed energy consumption models for fog offloading versus local computing, focusing on radio front-end effects and PA distortion.

Findings

Fog offloading is most energy efficient for short, wideband links.

Energy savings depend on radio front-end characteristics and PA distortion.

Offloading reduces IoT device energy consumption under specific link conditions.

Abstract

Fog computing can be used to offload computationally intensive tasks from battery powered Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Although it reduces energy required for computations in an IoT device, it uses energy for communications with the fog. This paper analyzes when usage of fog computing is more energy efficient than local computing. Detailed energy consumption models are built in both scenarios with the focus set on the relation between energy consumption and distortion introduced by a Power Amplifier (PA). Numerical results show that task offloading to a fog is the most energy efficient for short, wideband links.