Computation Offloading in Mobile Cloud Computing and Mobile Edge Computing: Survey, Taxonomy, and Open Issues

Abstract

Cloud and mobile edge computing (MEC) provides a wide range of computing services for mobile applications. In particular, mobile edge computing enables a computing and storage infrastructure provisioned closely to the end-users at the edge of a cellular network. The small base stations are deployed to establish a mobile edge network that can be coined with cloud infrastructure. A large number of enterprises and individuals rely on services offered by mobile edge and clouds to meet their computational and storage demands. Based on user behavior and demand, the computational tasks are first offloaded from mobile users to the mobile edge network and then executed at one or several specific base stations in the mobile edge network. The MEC architecture has the capability to handle a large number of devices that in turn generate high volumes of traffic. In this work, we first provide a holistic overview of MCC/MEC technology that includes the background and evolution of remote computation technologies. Then, the main part of this paper surveys up-to-date research on the concepts of offloading mechanisms, offloading granularities, and computational offloading techniques. Furthermore, we discuss the offloading mechanism in the static and dynamic environment along with optimization techniques. We further discuss the challenges and potential future directions for MEC research.