Joint Server Assignment and Resource Management for Edge-Based MAR System

Abstract

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) applications usually contain computation-intensive tasks which far outstrip the capability of mobile devices. One way to overcome this is offloading computation-intensive MAR tasks to remote clouds. However, the wide area network delay is hard to reduce. Thanks to edge computing, we can offload MAR tasks to nearby servers. Prior studies focus on either single-task MAR applications offloading or dependent tasks offloading for a single user. In this article, we study the offloading decision of MAR applications from multiple users, each of which is comprised of a chain of dependent tasks, over a generic cloud-edge system consisting of a group of heterogeneous edge servers and remote clouds. We formulate the Multi-user Multi-task MAR Application Scheduling (M3AS) problem, which is NP-hard. We present Mutas, an efficient scheduling algorithm that jointly optimizes server assignment and resource management. We also consider the online version of M3AS and present OnMutas. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that both Mutas and OnMutas can significantly reduce the service delays of MAR applications when compared to three other heuristics.