Dependent tasks offloading in mobile edge computing: A multi-objective evolutionary optimization strategy

Abstract

Due to the proliferation of applications such as virtual reality and online games with high real-time requirements, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has become a promising computing paradigm that can improve user experience and reduce the task offloading latency. The cloud–edge-end collaborative offloading further addresses the problem of insufficient computing resources of edge servers owing to large-scale computing-intensive applications in MEC. However, existing offloading solutions often ignore the important factor of economic cost, making it hard for these solutions to achieve a sustainable cloud–edge-end collaborative computation. To this end, this paper considers a multi-user multi-server, cloud–edge-end collaborative offloading scenario in the presence of dependent offloading tasks for the sake of maximizing rewards and minimizing latency. Each user issues a computing-intensive application consisting of multiple dependent tasks, which are offloaded collaboratively by various computational resources. With the goal of maximizing the yield of offloading for users and server providers, a multi-objective optimization problem of joint task offloading and execution rewards is studied. Technically, a multivariate multi-objective optimization problem with three objectives is modeled. An efficient multi-objective evolutionary optimization algorithm based on MOEA/D is then developed to solve the latency minimization and reward maximization problems. Extensive simulation results verify the effectiveness of the algorithm and illustrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve user offloading benefits. In addition, a scalability evaluations of our proposed algorithm is conducted for demonstrating its feasibility in large-scale task offloading scenarios.