Dynamic Social-Aware Computation Offloading for Low-Latency Communications in IoT

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) as a prospective platform to develop mobile applications, is facing with significant challenges posed by the tension between resource-constrained mobile smart devices and low-latency demanding applications. Recently, mobile edge computing (MEC) is emerging as a cornerstone technology to address such challenges in IoT. In this paper, by leveraging social ties in human social networks, we investigate the optimal dynamic computation offloading mode selection to jointly minimize the total tasks' execution latency and the mobile smart devices' energy consumption in MEC-aided low-latency IoT. Different from the previous studies, which mostly focus on how to exploit social tie structure among mobile smart device users to construct the permutation of all the feasible modes, we consider dynamic computation offloading mode selection with social awareness-aided network resource assignment, involving both the computing resources and transmit power from heterogeneous mobile smart devices. On the one hand, we formulate the dynamic computation offloading mode selection into the infinite-horizon time-average renewal-reward problems subject to time average latency constraints on a collection of penalty processes. On the other hand, an efficient solution is also developed, which elaborates on a Lyapunov optimization-based approach, i.e., drift-plus-penalty (DPP) algorithm. Numerical simulations are provided to validate the theoretical analysis and assess the performance of the proposed dynamic social-aware computation offloading mode selection method considering different configurations of the IoT network parameters.