Dependent task offloading mechanism for cloud–edge-device collaboration

Edge computing, which locates edge servers with limited computing and storage resources at the edge of networks, is expected as a novel architecture for low-latency applications. In edge computing, users offload a task to edge servers due to poor computing resources and batteries of mobile devices so that the edge servers execute the offloaded task and return the result of it to users. Users can thus enjoy various applications without depending on the limitations of mobile devices. However, when the edge server’s load is too heavy, a large number of tasks will be offloaded to distant cloud servers. The long distance between users and cloud servers significantly degrades the quality of mobile applications. To prevent this problem, we propose flow splitting and aggregation schemes to improve offload delay to cloud servers in edge computing. This scheme splits TCP connections between users and cloud servers at the edge server, and then aggregates TCP connections between the edge server and cloud servers. We show the effectiveness of our scheme through simulation evaluations.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emerging computing and communication model that brings extremely resourceful servers at a network's edge. This reduces the latency associated with cloud computing as applications executing on mobile devices do not always need to communicate with a cloud server because most of the functionalities provided by the cloud server are available on an edge server. Moreover, with the emergence of 5G really high amount of bandwidth is available to a mobile device, hence communication latency between the edge server and a mobile device is low. The combination of 5G and edge computing has a potential to better enable many interesting time-critical and/or computationally expensive computing and communication use cases, for example, connected cars. The stated combination enables development of computationally expensive applications for mobile devices and sensors nodes as these devices can offload their computational tasks to the edge server. Task offloading is a promising feature of edge computing, therefore here priority-class-based methods are presented to allocated CPU cycles to an offloaded task at the edge server. In one of the presented methods, a mobile device or a senor node assign their task to one of the available priority classes, and then offload the task to the edge server. Afterwards, the edge server assigns CPU cycles to such a task depending upon its priority class. Similarly, another method is presented that assigns priority to each device based on the type of tasks the device is offloading. While assigning CPU cycles to different offloaded tasks, the edge server uses their device priority. The simulation results demonstrate that the presented methods are capable of providing service differentiation.

In mobile edge computing (MEC), mobile devices can choose to offload their tasks to edge servers for execution, thereby effectively reducing the completion time of tasks and energy consumption of mobile devices. However, most of the data transfer brought by offloading relies on wireless communication technology, making the private information of mobile devices vulnerable to eavesdropping and monitoring. Privacy leakage, especially the location and association privacies, can pose a significant risk to users of mobile devices. Therefore, protecting the privacy of mobile devices during task offloading is important and cannot be ignored. This paper considers both location privacy and association privacy of mobile devices during task offloading in MEC and targets to reduce the leakage of location and association privacy while minimizing the average completion time of tasks. To achieve these goals, we design a privacy-preserving task offloading scheme to protect location privacy and association privacy. The scheme is mainly divided into two parts. First, we adopt a proxy forwarding mechanism to protect the location privacy of mobile devices from being leaked. Second, we select the proxy server and edge server for each task that needs to be offloaded. In the proxy server selection policy, we make a choice based on the location information of proxy servers, to reduce the leakage risk of location privacy. In the edge server selection strategy, we consider the privacy conflict between tasks, the computing ability, and location of edge servers, to reduce the leakage risk of association privacy plus the average completion time of tasks as much as possible. Simulated experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is effective in protecting the location privacy and association privacy of mobile devices and reducing the average completion time of tasks compared with the-state-of-art techniques.

Joint task offloading and data caching in mobile edge computing networks

In medical vehicular networks, medical vehicles can serve as efficient mobile medical service points to provide necessary and critical medical services for patients while in motion. The delay requirement is very vital for medical services to guarantee service quality and save the lives of patients. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), as an emerging network paradigm, enables the computation extensive tasks to be offloaded to edge servers, efficiently reducing the delay and bandwidth demands. MEC technology is a promising solution to provide high-quality medical services for users in medical vehicular networks. However, task offloading and resource allocation incurs additional service delay and energy consumption, affecting the overall service performance and Quality of Experience (QoE) of users. Thus, realizing the optimal task offloading and resource allocation in MEC-enabled medical vehicular networks, to reduce task completion time and energy consumption, becomes a potential challenge. To address the challenge, we investigate the joint task offloading and resource allocation problem in MEC-enabled medical vehicular networks to improve the QoE of users. Considering the resource requirements and QoS constraint, we formulate a multi-objective optimization model, with the target of average task completion time and average energy consumption minimization. On this basis, we propose a MOEAD-based task offloading and resource allocation (IMO) algorithm to solve it. Furthermore, in order to obtain the optimal solution and speed up the algorithm convergence, we design a greedy strategy-based population initialization algorithm. The extensive simulations demonstrate that compared to existing algorithms, our proposed IMO algorithm can obtain a smaller average completion time, and achieve better tradeoff between task completion time and energy consumption.

Edge computing provides a feasible technical solution to solve the problem of resource and energy supply constraints in terminal device deep learning applications. By migrating part of the deep learning application computing from the terminal to the cloud edge server, the computing pressure of the terminal device can be greatly relieved, and the energy consumption of the terminal can also be reduced to a certain extent. However, in the process of computing migration, the context switching loss of deep learning applications results in a long delay. This paper studies the problem of minimizing the completion time of deep learning applications under edge computing. We model the deep learning application as a task graph, and consider the constraints such as task switching delay, energy consumption and task dependency. Without changing the structure of the task graph, we transform it into a task scheduling-based application completion time minimization problem. In this paper, we first design a parallel scheduling algorithm based on greedy search. Considering the loss of context switching and the dependence of task data, we can allocate tasks to multiple processors for parallel processing by calculating the expected completion time of tasks, thus reducing the completion time of applications. Based on the experimental results, the greedy scheduling algorithm and comparison algorithm are analyzed and verified to optimize the completion time of different depth learning applications.

Today, with the presence of 5G communication systems, including Internet of Things (IoT) technology, there is a high demand for mobile devices (especially smartphones, tablets, wearable technology, and so on). Regarding this proliferation and high demand, the massive adoption of mobile devices (MDs) has led to an exponential increase in network latency; the heavy demand for cloud servers causes the degradation of data traffic, which considerably impacts the real-time communication and computing aspects of mobile devices. As a result, mobile edge computing (MEC), an efficient framework capable of enhancing processing, optimizing energy usage, and offloading computation tasks, is considered a promising solution. In current research, numerous models have been implemented to achieve resource allocation and task offloading. However, these techniques are ineffective due to privacy issues and a lack of sufficient resources. Hence, this study proposes secure task offloading and resource allocation strategies in mobile devices using the Probit Mish–Gated Recurrent Unit (PM-GRU) and Entropic Linear Interpolation-Serval Optimization Algorithm (ELI-SOA). Primarily, the tasks to be offloaded and their attributes are gathered from mobile users and passed to a local computing model to identify the edge server. Here, the task attributes and the server attributes are compared with a cache table using the Sorensen–Dice coefficient. If the attributes match, then details about the appropriate edge server are produced. If the attributes do not match, then they are inputted into a global scheme that analyzes the attributes and predicts the edge server based on the Probit Mish-Gated Recurrent Unit (PM-GRU). Then, the server information is preserved and updated in the cache table in the local scheme. Further, the attributes, along with the predicted edge server, are inputted into a system for privacy-preserving smart contract creation by using Exponential Earth Mover’s Distance Matrix-Based K-Anonymity (EEMDM-KA) to develop a secure smart contract. Subsequently, the traffic attributes in the smart contract are extracted, and the request load is balanced by using HCD-KM. Load-balanced requests are assigned to the edge server, and the optimal resources are allocated in the cloud server by using the Entropic Linear Interpolation-Serval Optimization Algorithm (ELI-SOA). Finally, the created smart contract is hashed based on KECCAK-512 and stored in the blockchain. With a high accuracy of 99.84%, the evaluation results showed that the proposed approach framework performed better than those used in previous efforts.

Taking the mobile edge computing paradigm as an effective supplement to the vehicular networks can enable vehicles to obtain network resources and computing capability nearby, and meet the current large-scale increase in vehicular service requirements. However, the congestion of wireless networks and insufficient computing resources of edge servers caused by the strong mobility of vehicles and the offloading of a large number of tasks make it difficult to provide users with good quality of service. In existing work, the influence of network access point selection on task execution latency was often not considered. In this paper, a pre-allocation algorithm for vehicle tasks is proposed to solve the problem of service interruption caused by vehicle movement and the limited edge coverage. Then, a system model is utilized to comprehensively consider the vehicle movement characteristics, access point resource utilization, and edge server workloads, so as to characterize the overall latency of vehicle task offloading execution. Furthermore, an adaptive task offloading strategy for automatic and efficient network selection, task offloading decisions in vehicular edge computing is implemented. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the overall task execution performance and reduces the time overhead of task offloading.

The rapid evolution of 6G networks has brought new challenges in the domain of task offloading (TO), particularly within edge computing environments that are heavily reliant on the internet of things (IoT). Traditional TO methods that based on rule-based heuristics or shallow learning techniques fail to adapt efficiently to the dynamic, unpredictable network conditions, resource heterogeneity, and varying task demands. The proliferation of edge computing, the IoT, and 6G networks has introduced new challenges in TO due to dynamic network conditions, resource heterogeneity, and unpredictable task demands. To address these challenges, this work proposes an innovative TO method that integrates deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with heuristic search methods. The combination of DRL and heuristic algorithms enhances adaptability, convergence speed, and decision-making efficiency, making it well-suited for real-time TO in complex and unpredictable environments This paper proposes a novel hybrid TO framework that integrates DRL with genetic algorithms (GA) to address these challenges. The proposed hybrid optimization technique offer promising solutions by leveraging the strengths of individual approaches to balance competing objectives, such as energy consumption, task completion time, and resource utilization. This method explores optimization strategies to enhance TO efficiency in decentralized environments mainly focusing on optimizing energy use while ensuring performance metrics like latency, throughput, and task deadlines are met.

With the development of artificial intelligence technology and intelligent devices, people show great interest in intelligent applications and services, but it is impossible to complete these compute-intensive AI tasks locally, especially video analysis tasks. Edge computing is regarded as an appropriate solution to these problems. In this paper, we study the multi-user multi-server edge-end collaboration video analytics task offloading problem aiming at minimizing the overall delay for each device to finish its task. Each device chooses whether to execute the task locally or to offload the task to an edge server, and which edge server to select. At the theoretical level, we model the joint problem of task offloading and resource allocation as a mixed integer programming problem. We first determine the optimal resource allocation policy with a given task offloading decision profile. Then, task offloading problem is modeled as a congestion game and propose a decentralized mechanism to achieve a Nash equilibrium. Moreover, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient and can significantly and steadily improve the system performance, reducing the overall delay by 33.96% on average, compared with other algorithms.

Vehicle capacities and intelligence are rapidly increasing, which will likely support a wide range of novel and interesting applications. However, these resources are not effectively utilized. To take advantage of these invaluable capabilities in smart vehicles, they can be used in the cloud environment and can be operated through distributed computing platforms in order to benefit from their combined processing power, storage capacity, and memory resources. Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is a promising field that allows computing tasks to be transferred from cloud servers to vehicular edge servers for processing, allowing data and apps to be placed closer to vehicles (users). This paper proposes a framework that combines two modules, the first one for managing microservice caching in vehicle-mounted edge networks, such that we use cluster-based caching technique to deal with the case where similar microservices are frequently requested in VEC. The second one integrates the computational capabilities of the edge servers with the capabilities of vehicles to perform task offloading in a collaborative manner. Our solution addresses the limitations of existing edge computing platforms during peak times by combining microservices caching with computational task offloading to improve overall system performance.

Vehicle Edge Computing (VEC) leverages compact cloud computing at the mobile network edge to meet the processing and latency needs of vehicles. By bringing computation closer to the vehicles, VEC reduces data transmission, minimizes latency, and boosts performance for compute-intensive applications. However, during peak hours of urban road traffic, the scarce computational resources available at edge servers could pose challenges in fulfilling the processing needs of vehicles. Introducing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as supplementary edge computing nodes could significantly mitigate the aforementioned issue. In this paper, we propose a flexible edge computing framework in which a fleet of UAVs function as mobile computational service providers, offering computation offloading services to multiple vehicles. We design and optimize a computation offloading model for the UAV-enabled vehicle edge computing environment. The proposed model tackles the task offloading challenge, aiming to optimize UAV revenue and task processing efficiency while considering the constraints of UAVs’ restricted computational power and energy resources. Towards this end, our model jointly considers two key factors: task partitioning and computational resource allocation. To tackle the challenges posed by the aforementioned non-convex optimization problem, we construct a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model for the multi-UAV-enabled mobile edge computing system and introduce an innovative Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) framework addressing the decision-making challenge represented by MDP model. Comprehensive simulation outcomes illustrate that our devised task offloading technique outperforms other optimization methods.

Task offloading and resource allocation are the major elements of edge computing. A reasonable task offloading strategy and resource allocation scheme can reduce task processing time and save system energy consumption. Most of the current studies on the task migration of edge computing only consider the resource allocation between terminals and edge servers, ignoring the huge computing resources in the cloud center. In order to sufficiently utilize the cloud and edge server resources, we propose a coarse-grained task offloading strategy and intelligent resource matching scheme under Cloud-Edge collaboration. We consider the heterogeneity of mobile devices and inter-channel interference, and we establish the task offloading decision of multiple end-users as a game-theory-based task migration model with the objective of maximizing system utility. In addition, we propose an improved game-theory-based particle swarm optimization algorithm to obtain task offloading strategies. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other schemes with respect to latency and energy consumption, and it scales well with increases in the number of mobile devices.

Traditional state-of-the-art cloud-computing is intrinsically suitable for processing computation-intensive image processing tasks due to its abundant computing and storage resource. However, the current cloud-based architecture requires remote data offloading, resulting in large transmission delay, making it highly unsuitable for current IoT based applications that are latency-sensitive. Our solution is to use the edge-computing technique to assist the cloud platform by processing the tasks on the edge servers that are placed close to the data sources. In this thesis, we apply edge-computing for two closely-related image processing tasks that are very common in modern IoT applications. First, we consider a large-scale camera surveillance system for human re-identification. Our proposed solution considers the interplay between edge and cloud server, which we model mathematically and formulate as a bi-criteria optimization problem. We develop a measurement-driven offline algorithm that models the system's heterogeneity in terms of workload complexity. We propose an online algorithm which is based on linearization and a pipage rounding technique that efficiently solves the formulated optimization problem. The solution gives the decision variables that maintain the user-defined trade-off between system utility and responsiveness. In the second work, we develop a novel edge-assisted hierarchical platform. Our platform utilizes the processing capability at the edge to pre-process the workload to approximate the most relevant features, which are then precisely analyzed at the cloud. Considering various responding and placement strategies, we formulate a latency-minimization problem. Using a queuing mechanism, we capture the background workload's influence at the edge server and develop a two-stage algorithm to solve the problem. The solution gives optimal responding and placement strategies to process the body-detection task in the most time-efficient way. We implement our entire system on a commercial cloud platform and use extensive simulations and experiments to validate its efficacy and responsiveness in practice.

Mobile devices have certain restrictions such as processing power and network bandwidth. Edge computing can reduce load and delay by migrating the parts of application processing from mobile devices to edge servers. Edge computing is a method that extends cloud computing to the edge of network. Conventional schemes of face recognition based on edge computing can reduce the amount of network transmission data between the edge servers and the cloud servers by preprocessing data on the edge servers. However, the schemes execute each task on a certain resource, thus application response time may increase according to the conditions of computational resources and network. Hence, a task placement system considering the conditions of computational resources and network is necessary. This paper proposes a task placement system for face recognition applications in edge computing. The proposed system calculates estimated response time of possible task placements based on the task placement decision formula. The formula parameterizes power and CPU utilization of computational resources and delay and bandwidth of network. The task placement that minimizes estimated response time is determined. We implemented a prototype of the proposed task placement system and evaluated its performance through experiment.