The Impact of Wireless Channel on the Performance of Computation Offloading in Fog Computing for Online Gaming Applications

The growing popularity of online games has led to significant attention being paid to the satisfaction of their audiences, especially in terms of reducing energy consumption and increasing the quality of games. However, the hardware limitations of smart devices on which the games are played pose a major challenge to the quality of games. To resolve this issue, new technologies such as fog computing was proposed for offloading processing tasks. Because access to the fog environment is generally done through wireless channels, it is necessary to study the impact of wireless channel on the efficiency of fog computing. In addition to the wireless channel, the incurred delay on the servers located in the fog environment should also be considered for the evaluation of fog computing performance. In this paper, we examine the impact of wireless channel on offloading performance and show under what conditions using the fog environment can reduce the energy consumption of users’ smart devices and also reduce latency in executing games. In order to calculate the delay in the fog servers, the order of servicing computational tasks is modeled by the service function chain and queueing theory is used to calculate the latency. Simulation results show that offloading does not always reduce energy consumption and delays, and the optimal decision regarding the assignment of tasks to the fog environment or its execution on the local device should take into account the conditions of wireless channel and the server capability located in the fog environment.