Introduction

Abstract

AbstractWith the development of mobile computing technology and the popularization of smart mobile devices, computation-intensive applications have been widely-deployed and gained more and more attention. Although the development of mobile devices and mobile applications have brought great convenience to people’s production and life, it has also lead to some new issues. Due to the resource limitations of mobile devices, such as limited battery capacity and limited computing resources, mobile devices can offload some computing tasks to the cloud for processing. But cloud centers are generally far away from mobile devices. Therefore, offloading tasks from mobile devices to the cloud incurs a lot of power consumption and large latency. The emerging mobile edge computing (MEC) effectively solves this problem. This book focuses on the energy efficiency of computation offloading in mobile edge computing, and proposes the energy-efficient computation offloading solutions. Since the wireless channel state and task request arrival process are stochastic and dynamic, designing a dynamic and energy-efficient task offloading strategy faces severe challenges. This chapter introduces the background and challenges of mobile cloud computing, MEC, and computation offloading. The challenges of computation offloading are summarized. Our main contributions in this book are also illustrated.