A Collaborative Task Offloading Framework for Smart TV Applications in a Household Computing Environment

Abstract

Smart TV can perform interactive computing while also providing video content services. However, this leads to a high delay during interactive computing because of the lack of computing capability, thus smart TVs are unable to undertake large scenes and complex interactive computing tasks. This article proposes a collaborative task offloading framework (CTOF) for interactive computing of smart TV video applications. The main contributions of this article are as follows: 1) a computing offloading mechanism is proposed for interactive computing with video content. A part of the interactive computing task is offloaded to the user’s high-computing mobile device in a household video service environment via a Wi-Fi Direct channel and 2) a collaborative computing offloading algorithm is proposed for complex interactive computing tasks. According to the computing complexity and the computing expansion coefficient, a parallel and serial collaborative smart offloading framework is established to minimize the delay. We conduct extensive experiments to indicate that in the existing experimental network environment, the video-based complex interactive service operation efficiency is improved by 20%. With a smart offloading framework, we can further achieve a satisfactory experience in terms of the interactive computing delay. Consequently, the smart TV can quickly respond to the complex video interactive service and improve the business interaction capability of the smart TV.