Offloading Schemes in Mobile Edge Computing with an Assisted Mechanism

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm for providing computing and storage capabilities in close proximity to mobile devices. To solve the scenario in which massive mobile devices have tasks to be processed at the same time, this paper proposes an assisted mechanism for the MEC system. When the primary MEC server is unable to meet the delay requirements of the mobile devices within its coverage area, a portion of the tasks can be offloaded to secondary MEC servers to obtain extra resources for processing. This MEC framework effectively reduces the computing and communication burden of the primary MEC server and improves the resource utilization of the secondary MEC servers. To maximize the system offloading utility in terms of latency, we formulated an optimization problem that jointly optimizes the task assignment, computing resource allocation and offloading decision of all mobile devices. Since the formulated problem is a mixed integer nonlinear problem, we use the decomposition method to convert the optimization problem into several subproblems. In addition, a heuristic algorithm based on the priorities of mobile devices and the MEC servers is proposed to obtain the suboptimal device offloading strategy. The numerical results show that the assisted mechanism can effectively reduce system latency and improve system reliability. In addition, the performance of our proposed algorithm is close to the optimal solution.