Computation offloading strategy in mobile edge computing

Abstract

Mobile phone applications have been rapidly growing and emerging with the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in augmented reality, virtual reality, and ultra-clear video due to the development of mobile Internet services in the last three decades. These applications demand intensive computing to support data analysis, real-time video processing, and decision-making for optimizing the user experience. Mobile smart devices play a significant role in our daily life, and such an upward trend is continuous. Nevertheless, these devices suffer from limited resources such as CPU, memory, and energy. Computation offloading is a promising technique that can promote the lifetime and performance of smart devices by offloading local computation tasks to edge servers. In light of this situation, the strategy of computation offloading has been adopted to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a computation offloading strategy under a scenario of multi-user and multi-mobile edge servers that considers the performance of intelligent devices and server resources. The strategy contains three main stages. In the offloading decision-making stage, the basis of offloading decision-making is put forward by considering the factors of computing task size, computing requirement, computing capacity of server, and network bandwidth. In the server selection stage, the candidate servers are evaluated comprehensively by multi-objective decision-making, and the appropriate servers are selected for the computation offloading. In the task scheduling stage, a task scheduling model based on the improved auction algorithm has been proposed by considering the time requirement of the computing tasks and the computing performance of the mobile edge computing server. Extensive simulations have demonstrated that the proposed computation offloading strategy could effectively reduce service delay and the energy consumption of intelligent devices, and improve user experience.