Time and resource constrained offloading with multi-task in a mobile edge computing node

Abstract

In recent years, the importance of the mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm along with the 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT) and virtualization of network functions is well noticed. Besides, the implementation of computation-intensive applications at the mobile device level is limited by battery capacity, processing capabalities and execution time. To increase the batteries life and improve the quality of experience for computationally intensive and latency-sensitive applications, offloading some parts of these applications to the MEC is proposed. This paper presents a solution for a hard decision problem that jointly optimizes the processing time and computing resources in a mobile edge-computing node. Hence, we consider a mobile device with an offloadable list of heavy tasks and we jointly optimize the offloading decisions and the allocation of IT resources to reduce the latency of tasks’ processing. Thus, we developped a heuristic solution based on the simulated annealing algorithm, which can improve the offloading rate and reduce the total task latency while meeting short decision time. We performed a series of experiments to show its efficiency. Finally, the obtained results in terms of full-time treatrement are very encouraging. In addition, our solution makes offloading decisions within acceptable and achievable deadlines.