A near-optimal cloud offloading under multi-user multi-radio environments

Abstract

Computation offloading is an effective way to augment computation capabilities of mobile devices for emerging resource-hungry mobile applications. In this paper, we study the computation offloading problem under multi-user multi-radio (MUMR) environments, where users can transmit partial computation tasks to a remote cloud via multiple radio links. We formulate the problem as a maximization of the total number of beneficial users in consideration of time delay and energy consumption simultaneously. Since the proposed optimization problem is a non-convex mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem that is difficult to tackle using conventional methods. We convert the MINLP problem into a bilinear problem equivalently by introducing additional variables and then relax the problem to a convex optimization problem by McCormic envelopes method. We develop a Branch and Bound algorithm to solve the problem, and numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain a near-optimal solution.