Priority-Based Servicing of Offloaded Tasks in Mobile Edge Computing

A Novel Lyapunov based Dynamic Resource Allocation for UAVs-assisted Edge Computing

Joint task offloading and data caching in mobile edge computing networks

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.

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.

Device to device (D2D) communication and mobile edge computing (MEC) are two promising technologies in fifth generation (5G) cellular mobile communication. Besides MEC, a new task offloading technique attracts the attention as D2D collaboration. However, there is lack of integrated D2D and MEC framework to address the energy and delay costs in a joint approach. This work, proposes an energy efficient and delay-aware offloading scheme (EEDOS) based on D2D collaboration in MEC. In EEDOS, mobile devices can offload their task to the MEC or an idle mobile device in their proximity. The task execution and offloading to the MEC or an idle nearby device is formulated, and the optimization problem is defined. The whole process of allocating proper offloading destination is designed in the edge server. EEDOS, classifies offloading requests according to the deadline and energy constraint of requesting device. Then, it finds the proper offloading destination by utilising the maximum matching with minimum cost graph algorithm. Through simulation, we show that EEDOS achieves 95 percent of energy efficiency in comparison of no-offloading task execution and outperforms existing studies in term of energy efficiency with an improved delay in task execution. Moreover, EEDOS is capable of performing more successful task offloading and requires less edge server resources.

QoS prediction for service recommendations in mobile edge computing

One of the challenges in autonomous driving is limited sensing from a single vehicle that causes spurious warnings and dead-lock situations. We posit that cloud-based vehicle control system[1] is promising when a number of vehicles must be controlled, since we can collect information from sensors across multiple vehicles for coordination. However, since cloud based control has inherent challenge in long-haul communication susceptible to prolonged latency and packet loss caused by congestion, mobile edge computing (MEC)[2] recently attracts attention in ITS in the next generation mobile network such as 5G. Although edge servers can perform data processing from the vehicles in ultra low latency in MEC, computational resources at edge servers are limited compared to cloud. Therefore, dynamic resource allocation and coordination between edge and cloud servers are necessary. In this paper, we propose infrastructure-based vehicle control system that shares internal states between edge and cloud servers, dynamically allocates computational resources and switches necessary computation on collected sensors according to network conditions in order to achieve safe driving. We implement a prototype system using micro-cars and evaluate the stability of infrastructure-based vehicle control. We show that proposed system mitigates instability of cloud control caused by latency fluctuation. As a result, when controlled from the cloud with 150ms latency, micro-cars deviate by over 0.095m from the course for the 40% of the entire trajectory possibly causing car accidents. On the other hand, MEC-based control stabilizes the driving trajectory. Also, our proposed system automatically switches control from cloud and from edge server according to the network condition without degrading the stability in driving trajectory. Even when the ratio of time of control by edge server to that by cloud is suppressed to 54%, we can achieve almost the same stability as in full control by edge controller.

Task offloading and scheduling is an important issue in mobile edge computing (MEC). A good offloading decision can fully utilize the computing capabilities of edge servers to deliver high-quality computing services. This paper takes into account the concerns about task processing latency and mobile device's energy consumption, and formulates the task offloading problem as a deadline-constrained energy-minimization integer program. We propose a partial offloading and scheduling method based on the whale optimization algorithm to solve the formulated optimization problem. This method employs a probability model-based mapping operator to convert an individual whale into a valid offloading solution represented by a task sequence. This mapping scheme is advantageous over sorting-based rules in producing high-quality task sequence. We develop an efficient heuristic strategy to decide each task should be processed locally on the mobile device or offloaded to the edge server for execution. With all tasks in the sequence having been scheduled, the mobile device's energy consumption for task execution and data transmission can be calculated. Accordingly, we can identify the best individual whale in the population leading to the solution with lowest energy consumption. We iteratively apply the population updating rule to explore better task sequence and offloading solution. We perform extensive experiments to verify that the proposed algorithm achieves more energy-efficient offloading solutions as compared to baseline algorithms while satisfying the deadline constraint.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a recent communication paradigm developed mainly for cellular networks. MEC is introduced to improve the whole network efficiency by offloading its operations to nearby clouds. Cellular networks are able to offer the cloud computing capabilities at the edge of the radio access network through MEC servers. Mobiles services and tasks can either be executed at the mobile device or offloaded to the edge server. In this work, we provide a latency aware and energy aware offloading algorithm for the 5G multilevel edge computing based cellular system. The algorithm enables the mobile device to request offloading or decide the local execution independently based on the available resources at the mobile device and edge server. The algorithm takes into consideration the energy consumption to handle the service and make the offloading decision that achieves higher energy performance. The system is simulated and numerical results are included for performance evaluation.

We consider the efficient resource allocation task in the blockchain-based mobile edge computing (MEC) system that requires decentralized transaction management to validate transactions between edge servers (ESs) and mobile devices (MDs). In such task allocation process (where MDs' resources are limited and privacy-sensitive), it is a significant challenge to guarantee individual rationality with satisfactory system stability while enabling flexible task offloading under various locality constraints (e.g., communication distance, bandwidth and delay). In this paper, we formulate the target problem as a blockchain-assisted task-resource matching model, and then propose a near optimal locality-aware resource allocation mechanism over smart contract to enable automatic and efficient transactions in MEC system. More specifically, for the service agents selection, we design the preference-based selection strategy to get highest estimated profit. For the flexible task offloading, we develop the minimum delay task graph partitioning algorithm to determine the optimal task offloading solution for MD under different resource bundles. For the task-resource matching, we propose a task-resource matching game (based on potential game) with the second lowest cost strategy to determine the matching of task-resource and decide the price of resource bundle. For the transaction verification and block allocation, we propose a social welfare-driven consensus mechanism to enable verified transaction and fair block allocation in a reward-free way. Strict theoretical analysis and extensive simulations demonstrate that our mechanism guarantees individual rationality, Nash Equilibrium, and stable near optimal solution.

Dependent task offloading mechanism for cloud–edge-device collaboration

As mobile devices become more powerful, mobile crowdsourcing began to emerge in technology circles. It provides a new way to reduce the load on edge servers. In mobile edge computing, the computation task needs to be dynamically migrated between multiple service nodes in order to maintain service continuity. But a service node is either an edge server or a mobile device in mobile crowdsourcing, which makes task migration more complex. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based task migration strategy for mobile crowdsourcing systems with the goal of meeting the task deadline requirement and minimizing the average cost of task completion. The proposed strategy firstly applies the long short-term memory (LSTM) network to predict the future movement of mobile devices and then utilizes a hybrid algorithm based on asynchronous deep Q-learning (ADQN) and ant colony optimization (ACO) to generate the optimal task migration strategy. The proposed strategy is evaluated by a simulation process. The results show that the proposed strategy performs better than the current state-of-the-art methods applied to similar problems.

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.

For several reasons, the cloud computing paradigm, e.g., mobile edge computing (MEC), is suffering from the problem of privacy issues. MEC servers provide personalization services to mobile users for better QoE qualities, but the ongoing migrated data from the source edge server to the destination edge server cause users to have privacy concerns and unwillingness of self‐disclosure, which further leads to a sparsity problem. As a result, personalization services ignore valuable user profiles across edges where users have accounts in and tend to predict users’ potential purchases with insufficient sources, thereby limiting further improvement of QoE through personalization of the contents. This paper proposes a novel model, called CEPTM, which (1) collects mobile user data across multiple MEC edge servers, (2) improves the users’ experience in personalization services by loading collected diverse data, and (3) lowers their privacy concern with the improved personalization. This model also reveals that famous topics in one edge server can migrate into several other edge servers with users’ favorite content tags and that the diverse types of items could increase the possibility of users accepting the personalization service. In the experiment section, we use exploratory factor analysis to mathematically evaluate the correlations among those factors that influence users’ information disclosure in the MEC network, and the results indicate that CEPTM (1) achieves a high rate of personalization acceptance due to the availability of more data as input and highly diverse personalization as output and (2) gains the users’ trust because it collects user data while respecting individual privacy concerns and providing better personalization. It outperforms a traditional personalization service that runs on a single‐edge server. This paper provides new insights into MEC diverse personalization services and privacy problems, and researchers and personalization providers can apply this model to merge popular users’ like trends throughout the MEC edge servers and generate better data management strategies.

In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, offloading computational tasks to edge servers is a key technology for alleviating the resource bottlenecks of mobile devices (MDs). However, in high-concurrency task offloading scenarios, edge servers face the issue of low resource allocation efficiency. Existing resource allocation schemes typically aim to improve resource utilization by indiscriminately redistributing idle resources, but these approaches fail to address the diversity of task demands. Due to the non-monotonic relationship between the computational load and latency constraints of different tasks, tasks exhibit heterogeneous resource demands under heterogeneous workloads. Therefore, fixed resource allocation strategies are difficult to adapt to the changes in task characteristics, leading to some tasks failing to complete on time due to insufficient resources, which in turn violates latency constraints and degrades overall system performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Task-Requirement-Based Resource Adaptive Allocation Algorithm (TRRAA). First, we construct a mathematical model to evaluate task requirements and quantify the computational resource demands of tasks at different time steps. Then, the algorithm dynamically allocates idle resources based on the real-time demands of tasks, prioritizing resources for tasks that are expected to miss their time constraints, ensuring timely completion. Finally, experimental results show that, compared to existing methods, the TRRAA algorithm improves task completion rates by 10 % when handling latency-constrained tasks.