BLOT: Bandit Learning-Based Offloading of Tasks in Fog-Enabled Networks

Task offloading is a promising technology to exploit the available computational resources in spatially distributed fog nodes efficiently in the era of fog computing. In this paper, we look for an online task offloading strategy to minimize the long-term cost, which factors in the latency, the energy consumption, and the switching cost. To this end, we formulate a stochastic programming problem and the expectations of the system parameters are allowed to change abruptly at unknown time instants. Meanwhile, we consider the fact that the queried nodes can only feed back the processing results after finishing the tasks. Then we put forth an effective bandit learning algorithm, i.e., the BLOT, to solve this challenging stochastic programming under the non-stationary bandit model. We also demonstrate that our proposed BLOT algorithm is asymptotically optimal in a non-stationary fog-enabled network. Numerical experiments further verify the superb performance of BLOT.