Load balance -aware dynamic cloud-edge-end collaborative offloading strategy

Abstract

Cloud-edge-end (CEE) computing is a hybrid computing paradigm that converges the principles of edge and cloud computing. In the design of CEE systems, a crucial challenge is to develop efficient offloading strategies to achieve the collaboration of edge and cloud offloading. Although CEE offloading problems have been widely studied under various backgrounds and methodologies, load balance, which is an indispensable scheme in CEE systems to ensure the full utilization of edge resources, is still a factor that has not yet been accounted for. To fill this research gap, we are devoted to developing a dynamic load balance -aware CEE offloading strategy. First, we propose a load evolution model to characterize the influences of offloading strategies on the system load dynamics and, on this basis, establish a latency model as a performance metric of different offloading strategies. Then, we formulate an optimal control model to seek the optimal offloading strategy that minimizes the latency. Second, we analyze the feasibility of typical optimal control numerical methods in solving our proposed model, and develop a numerical method based on the framework of genetic algorithm. Third, through a series of numerical experiments, we verify our proposed method. Results show that our method is effective.