Joint Optimization of Energy Consumption and Latency in Mobile Edge Computing for Internet of Things

Abstract

With wide adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) across the world, the IoT devices are facing more and more intensive computation task nowadays. However, the IoT devices are usually limited by their computing capability and battery lifetime. Mobile edge computing provides new opportunities for developments of IoT, since edge computing servers which are close to devices can provide more powerful computing resources. The IoT devices can offload the intensive computing tasks to edge computing servers, while saving their own computing resources and reducing energy consumption. However, the benefits come at the cost of higher latency, mainly due to additional transmission time, and it may be unacceptable for many IoT applications. In this paper, we try to find a tradeoff between the energy consumption and latency, in order to satisfy user demands of various IoT applications. We formalize the problem into a constrained multiobjective optimization problem and find the optimal solutions by a modified fast and elitist nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). To improve the performance of the algorithm, we propose a novel problem-specific encoding scheme and genetic operators in the proposed modified NSGA-II. We also conduct extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithm and its sensitivity under certain major parameters. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can find a large number of optimal solutions to adjust the corresponding offloading decision according to the real-world situation.