Dynamic Offloading and Resource Scheduling for Mobile-Edge Computing with Energy Harvesting Devices

Abstract

Driven by Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G communication technologies, the paradigm of mobile computing has changed from centralized mobile cloud computing to distributed mobile edge computing (MEC). Narrowing the gap between high quality of service (QoS) requirements and limited computing resources, and improving the utilization of computing resources between IoT devices and edge servers have become key issues. In this paper, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem involving dynamic offloading and resource scheduling between the local devices, base station (BS) and the back-end cloud. The goal is to minimize the consumption of energy and computing resources in the MEC system with energy harvesting (EH) devices, while meeting the QoS requirements of IoT devices. In order to solve this stochastic optimization problem, we convert it into a deterministic optimization problem, and propose an online dynamic offloading and resource scheduling algorithm (DORS) based on Lyapunov optimization theory. It is proved that the DORS algorithm can effectively balance the relationship between scheduling cost and MEC system's performance. The comparison experiments show the effectiveness of the DORS algorithm in reducing the energy consumption.