  While the success of edge and fog computing increased with the proliferation
of the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, such novel computing paradigm, that
moves compute resources closer to the source of data and services, must address
many challenges such as reducing communication overhead to/from datacenters,
the latency to compute and receive results, as well as energy consumption at
the mobile and IoT devices. fog-to-fog (f2f) cooperation has recently been
proposed to increase the computation capacity at the network edge through
cooperation across multiple stakeholders. In this paper we adopt an analytical
approach to studying f2f cooperation paradigm. We highlight the benefits of
using such new paradigm in comparison with traditional three-tier fog computing
paradigms. We use a Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) model for the N f2f
cooperating nodes and cast cooperation as an optimization problem, which we
solve using the proposed model.
