TReB: Task dependency aware-Resource allocation for Internet of Things using Binary offloading

Abstract

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications in domains such as healthcare, smart homes, and autonomous vehicles has led to an exponential increase in data generated by compute intensive tasks. Efficiently offloading these tasks to nearby computational resources in fog environments remains a significant challenge due to the inherent heterogeneity and constrained resources of Fog Nodes (FNs). Most of the existing approaches fail to address the trade-offs between latency, energy, and resource utilization, particularly when managing dependent and independent task workloads. Moreover, establishing an offloading strategy within a densely interconnected IoT network is known to be NP-hard. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we propose a Task dependency-Aware Resource allocation for IoT using Binary offloading (TReB) framework by considering both independent and dependent tasks of IoT applications. The TReB utilizes the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique to generate the preferences of FNs and tasks by considering diverse attributes. With preferences established, a binary offloading is handled through a one-to-many matching procedure, utilizing a Deferred Acceptance Algorithm (DAA). It allows TReB to jointly minimize system energy consumption, latency, and the number of outages in an IoT network. We evaluated the effectiveness of TReB through simulation experiments, and results show that the proposed approach achieves a 49.1%, 62.4%, and 41.7% minimization in overall system latency, energy, and outages compared to the existing baselines. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.