Towards effective offloading mechanisms in fog computing

Fog computing is considered a formidable next-generation complement to cloud computing. Nowadays, in light of the dramatic rise in the number of IoT devices, several problems have been raised in cloud architectures. By introducing fog computing as a mediate layer between the user devices and the cloud, one can extend cloud computing's processing and storage capability. Offloading can be utilized as a mechanism that transfers computations, data, and energy consumption from the resource-limited user devices to resource-rich fog/cloud layers to achieve an optimal experience in the quality of applications and improve the system performance. This paper provides a systematic and comprehensive study to evaluate fog offloading mechanisms' current and recent works. Each selected paper's pros and cons are explored and analyzed to state and address the present potentialities and issues of offloading mechanisms in a fog environment efficiently. We classify offloading mechanisms in a fog system into four groups, including computation-based, energy-based, storage-based, and hybrid approaches. Furthermore, this paper explores offloading metrics, applied algorithms, and evaluation methods related to the chosen offloading mechanisms in fog systems. Additionally, the open challenges and future trends derived from the reviewed studies are discussed.