Computation Offloading Technique Research Articles

Partial and cost-minimized computation offloading in hybrid edge and cloud systems

Nowadays, numerous mobile devices (MDs) provide nearly anytime and anywhere services, running on top of various computation-intensive applications. However, bearing limited battery, bandwidth, computing, and storage resources, MDs cannot completely execute all tasks of such applications in real-time. Cloud data centers (CDCs) possess enormous resources and energy, which can help execute tasks offloaded from MDs. Nonetheless, CDCs reside in remote sites, thereby leading to long transmission latency. In recent years, small base stations (SBSs) have emerged to offer close proximity, high bandwidth, and low latency services to their nearby and limited MDs. However, it becomes a new challenge to minimize the total system cost in a complex and heterogeneous architecture. To address it, this work proposes an energy-minimized partial computation offloading technique. First, a limited optimization problem of cost minimization for the system is formulated. Afterward, an improved hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm is developed, which synergistically combines a Metropolis acceptance criterion of simulated annealing and genetic operations. One uniqueness of the proposed algorithm is that it simultaneously determines task allocation among MDs, an SBS, and a CDC, the transmission power of MDs, and bandwidth allocation of wireless channels between MDs and SBS. Experiments with real-life tasks from Google data centers have shown that the proposed Genetic Simulated-annealing-based Particle swarm optimization (GSP) significantly achieves lower system cost and faster convergence speed than benchmark peers.

Computation offloading techniques in edge computing: A systematic review based on energy, QoS and authentication

SummaryIn today's era, Internet of Things (IoT) devices generate a vast amount of data, which is typically stored in the cloud environment and can be accessed by edge and IoT devices. The data generated by these devices are offloaded through computation offloading (CO) techniques in an edge/cloud computing environment. This paper conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) to review the state‐of‐the‐art CO techniques in edge computing (EC) in the context of energy, Quality of Service (QoS), authentication and traceability. In this SLR, the evolution of offloading techniques is analyzed in detail. A total of 138 articles, spanning from 2016 to 2023 (till date), have been classified into QoS, energy, and authentication and traceability‐based CO techniques. The optimization‐based techniques are the most preferred choices to improve the QoS and reduce energy in the research field of CO in EC. In addition, this paper explores the significant issues and challenges that require further investigation. For future research, energy, QoS, and data provenance for dependent or dynamic task offloading in mobility scenarios can be explored further.

DRL-Based URLLC-Constraint and Energy-Efficient Task Offloading for Internet of Health Things.

Internet of Health Things (IoHT) is a promising e-Health paradigm that involves offloading numerous computational-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks from locally limited IoHT points to edge servers (ESs) with abundant computational resources in close proximity. However, existing computation offloading techniques struggle to meet the burgeoning health demands in ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC), one of the 5G application scenarios. This article proposes a Multi-Agent Soft-Actor-Critic-discrete based URLLC-constrained task offloading and resource allocation (MASACDUA) scheme to maximize throughput while minimizing power consumption on the remote side, considering the long-term URLLC constraints. The URLLC constraint conditions are formulated using extreme value theory, and Lyapunov optimization is employed to divide the problem into task offloading and computation resource allocation. MASAC-discrete and a queue backlog-aware algorithm are utilized to approach task offloading and computation resource allocation, respectively. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that MASACDUA outperforms traditional DRL algorithms under different IoHT points and data arrival rate intervals and achieves superior performance in delay, bound violation probability, and other characteristics related to URLLC.

DELOFF: Decentralized Learning-Based Task Offloading for Multi-UAVs in U2X-Assisted Heterogeneous Networks

With multi-sensors embedded, flexible unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can collect sensory data and provide various services for all walks of life. However, limited computing capability and battery energy put a great burden on UAVs to handle emerging compute-intensive applications, necessitating them to resort to innovative computation offloading technique to guarantee quality of service. Existing research mainly focuses on solving the offloading problem under known global information, or applying centralized offloading frameworks when facing dynamic environments. Yet, the maneuverability of today’s UAVs, their large-scale clustering, and their increasing operation in the environment with unrevealed information pose huge challenges to previous work. In this paper, in order to enhance the long-term offloading performance and scalability for multi-UAVs, we develop a decentralized offloading scheme named DELOFF with the support of mobile edge computing (MEC). DELOFF considers the information uncertainty caused by the dynamic environment, uses UAV-to-everything (U2X)-assisted heterogeneous networks to extend network resources and offloading flexibility, and tackles the joint strategy making related to computation mode, network selection, and offloading allocation for multi-UAVs. Specifically, the optimization problem of multi-UAVs is addressed by the proposed offloading algorithm based on a multi-arm bandit learning model, where each UAV itself can adaptively assess the offloading link quality through the fuzzy logic-based pre-screening mechanism designed. The convergence and effectiveness of the DELOFF proposed are also demonstrated in simulations. And, the results confirm that DELOFF is superior to the four benchmarks in many respects, such as reduced consumed energy and delay in the task completion of UAVs.

SyRoC: Symbiotic robotics for QoS-aware heterogeneous applications in IoT-edge-cloud computing paradigm

Smart Robots, as an advanced domain of widespread concern, can be applied in diverse fields to perform compute-intensive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, their onboard resource constraints necessitate using the computation offloading technique to extend their capabilities. Additionally, the distributed locations of robots and the diversified quality of service (QoS) requirements of different applications pose challenges to the existing offloading works. To address these concerns, we put forward a collaborative offloading scheme for QoS-aware utility optimization for multi-robot system, and the optimization problem is formulated based on multi-attribute utility theory. Our methodology consists of three critical components: (1) we construct a symbiotic collaboration model that leverages the advantages of multiple computation modes across IoT-edge-cloud infrastructure and tap the potential of multi-hop relay transmission technology to enable efficient collaborative offloading; (2) we develop a QoS-aware preference assessment framework based on analytic hierarchy process to effectively learn the preference weights of various applications executed and prioritizations for key QoS parameters affecting strategy-making of robots; and (3) we apply the game-theoretic approach to devise a symbiotic robotics computation offloading algorithm named SyRoC, which operates in a distributed manner to solve the optimization problem and determine the most effective strategies. To validate our scheme, we conduct a series of experiments on the software simulator, which demonstrate that our proposed scheme not only realizes stable performance on guaranteeing convergence and system utility when robots move dynamically, but also outperforms five typical algorithms in key metrics such as energy consumption (13.43%↓), delay (14.22%↓), and average QoS utility of robots corresponding to the four types of applications executed (12.80%↑, 7.30% ↑, 7.90% ↑,and12.71%↑) in scenarios involving the expansion of robot scales.

Optimization Techniques For Low Energy Consumption In Green Cloud Computing

Computing in the cloud can assist businesses in shifting their focus to the development of solid business applications that will bring about genuine value to the businesses. Green computing, often known as environmentally sustainable computing, is the definition of green computing. It is a reference to the efforts that are made to maximise the usage of power consumption & energy efficiency while simultaneously minimising the cost & the amount of CO2 emission. To conduct a study on optimisation techniques & procedures that assist us in optimising low energy consumption & evaluating multiple parameters in order to obtain the desired output is the primary purpose of this research. Energy-Conscious Multisite Computation Offloading Techniques (EMOGC) for Green Cloud Computing is the methodology that was utilised throughout this project. Simulation & analysis are presented in The Energy-Conscious Multisite Computation Offloading Techniques for Green Cloud Computing in order to investigate time-efficient scheduling on multisite, which is responsible for optimising energy, time, & cost at the optimum time. This strategy seeks to finish the application within the allotted amount of time while also consuming as little power as feasible from the connected devices. According to the findings of this research, it is clear that the explored technique is effective in obtaining high throughput (HT) while simultaneously minimising the execution time, which in turn enhances the data rate in Green Cloud Computing (GCC).

Handover-Enabled Dynamic Computation Offloading for Vehicular Edge Computing Networks

The computation offloading technique is a promising solution that empowers computationally limited resource devices to run delay-constrained applications efficiently. Vehicular edge computing incorporates the processing capabilities into the vehicles, and thus, provides computing services for other vehicles through computation offloading. Mobility affects the communication environment and leads to critical challenges for computation offloading. In this paper, we consider an intelligent task offloading scenario for vehicular environments including smart vehicles and roadside units, which can cooperate to perform resource sharing. Intending to minimize the average offloading cost which takes into account energy consumption together with delay in transmission and processing phases, we formulate the task offloading problem as an optimization problem and implement an algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning with Double Q-learning which allows user equipments to learn the offloading cost performance by observing the environment and make steady sequences of offloading decisions despite the uncertainties of the environment. Besides, concerning the high mobility of the environment, we propose a handover-enabled computation offloading strategy that leads to a better quality of service and experience for users in beyond 5G and 6G heterogeneous networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves low-cost performance compared to the existing offloading decision strategies in the literature.

Asynchronous Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based URLLC-Aware Computation Offloading in Space-Assisted Vehicular Networks

Space-assisted vehicular networks (SAVN) provide seamless coverage and on-demand data processing services for user vehicles (UVs). However, ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) demands imposed by emerging vehicular applications are hard to be satisfied in SAVN by existing computation offloading techniques. Traditional deep reinforcement learning algorithms are unsuitable for highly dynamic SAVN due to the underutilization of environment observations. An AsynchronouS federaTed deep Q-learning (DQN)-basEd and URLLC-aware cOmputatIon offloaDing algorithm (ASTEROID) is presented in this paper to achieve throughput maximization considering the long-term URLLC constraints. Specifically, we first establish an extreme value theory-based URLLC constraint model. Second, the task offloading and computation resource allocation are decomposed by employing Lyapunov optimization. Finally, an asynchronous federated DQN-based (AF-DQN) algorithm is presented to address the UV-side task offloading problem. The server-side computation resource allocation is settled by an queue backlog-aware algorithm. Simulation results verify that ASTEROID achieves superior throughput and URLLC performances.

Cooperative Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Computation Offloading: A Mobile Network Operator Perspective

Computation offloading decisions play a crucial role in implementing mobile-edge computing (MEC) technology in the Internet of Things (IoT) services. Mobile network operators (MNOs) can employ computation offloading techniques to reduce task completion delay and improve the Quality of Service (QoS) for users by optimizing the system’s processing delay and energy consumption. However, different IoT applications (e.g., entertainment and autonomous driving) generate different delay tolerances and benefits for computational tasks from the MNO perspective. Therefore, simply minimizing the delay of all tasks does not satisfy the QoS of each user. The system architecture design should consider the significance of users and the heterogeneity of tasks. Unfortunately, rare work has been done to discuss this practical issue. In this article, from the perspective of MNO, we investigate the computation offloading optimization problem of multiuser delay-sensitive tasks. First, we propose a new optimization model, which designs different optimization objectives for the cost and revenue of tasks. Then, we transform the problem into a Markov decision processes problem, which leads to designing a multiagent iterative optimization framework. For the strategic optimization of each agent, we further propose a cooperative multiagent deep reinforcement learning (CMDRL) algorithm to optimize two different objectives at the same time. Two agents are integrated into the CMDRL framework to enable agents to collaborate and converge to the global optimum in a distributed manner. At the same time, the priority experience replay method is introduced to improve the utilization rate of effective samples and the learning efficiency of the algorithm. The experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively achieve a significantly higher profit than the alternative state-of-the-art method and exhibit a more favorable computational performance than benchmark deep reinforcement learning methods.

Edge Intelligence in Smart Grids: A Survey on Architectures, Offloading Models, Cyber Security Measures, and Challenges

The rapid development of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the deployment of advanced Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices has led to the study and implementation of edge computing technologies in smart grid (SG) systems. In addition, substantial work has been expended in the literature to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) techniques into edge computing, resulting in the promising concept of edge intelligence (EI). Consequently, in this article, we provide an overview of the current state-of-the-art in terms of EI-based SG adoption from a range of angles, including architectures, computation offloading, and cybersecurity concerns. The basic objectives of this article are fourfold. To begin, we discuss EI and SGs separately. Then we highlight contemporary concepts closely related to edge computing, fundamental characteristics, and essential enabling technologies from an EI perspective. Additionally, we discuss how the use of AI has aided in optimizing the performance of edge computing. We have emphasized the important enabling technologies and applications of SGs from the perspective of EI-based SGs. Second, we explore both general edge computing and architectures based on EI from the perspective of SGs. Thirdly, two basic questions about computation offloading are discussed: what is computation offloading and why do we need it? Additionally, we divided the primary articles into two categories based on the number of users included in the model, either a single user or a multiple user instance. Finally, we review the cybersecurity threats with edge computing and the methods used to mitigate them in SGs. Therefore, this survey comes to the conclusion that most of the viable architectures for EI in smart grids often consist of three layers: device, edge, and cloud. In addition, it is crucial that computation offloading techniques must be framed as optimization problems and addressed effectively in order to increase system performance. This article typically intends to serve as a primer for emerging and interested scholars concerned with the study of EI in SGs.

QoE-Aware Edge Computing Through Service Function Chaining

Mobile multimedia Internet services, such as mobile virtual reality (VR), request for advanced quality of experience (QoE) provision. In the future Internet, such a QoE provision will be leveraged through edge computing, which can be facilitated through advanced programmable frameworks, such as service function chaining (SFC). To this direction, we provide in this work, the design, development, and experimentation of a QoE-aware edge computing framework using SFC. In particular, the QoE-aware edge computing is provided by a network function virtualization-enabled SFC architecture. The SFC architecture provides adaptive media services through programmable service functions (SFs). Our solution provides multimedia dynamic adaptive streaming HTTP services with QoE under certain network conditions. The proposed QoE-aware edge computing is guaranteed with both data and computation offloading techniques, including a required QoE-aware edge resource management. Specific use cases are designed in order to test our solution that shows better QoE in comparison with the baseline use case, where neither data nor computational offloading is considered.

Computation offloading technique for energy efficiency of smart devices

The substantial number of wearable devices in the healthcare industry and the continuous growth of the market procreates the demand for computational offloading. Despite major development of wearable devices and offloading techniques, there are several concerns such as latency, battery power, and computation capability that requires significant development. In this paper, we focus on the fact that most smart wearable devices have Bluetooth pairing with smartphones, and Bluetooth communication is significantly energy-efficient compare to 3G/LTE or Wi-Fi. We propose a computation offloading technique that offloads from the smartphone to the cloud server considering the decision model of both wearable devices and smartphones. Mobile cloud computing can elevate the capacity of smartphones considering the battery state and efficient communications with the cloud. In our model, we increase the energy efficiency of smart devices. To accomplish this, a Dhrystone Millions of Instructions per Second (DMIPS)-based workload measurement model along with a computation offloading decision model were created. According to the performance evaluation, offloading from wearable devices to smartphones and offloading once to cloud server can reduce energy consumption significantly.

A context-oriented framework for computation offloading in vehicular edge computing using WAVE and 5G networks

Despite technological advances, vehicles are still unable to meet the demands of some applications for massive computational resources in a feasible time. One way to deal with this situation is to integrate the computation offloading technique into a vehicular edge computing system. This integration allows application tasks to be executed on neighboring vehicles or edge servers coupled to base stations. However, the dynamic nature of vehicular networks, allied to overloaded servers, can lead to failures and reduce the effectiveness of the offloading technique. Therefore, we propose a context-oriented framework for computation offloading to reduce the application execution time and maintain high reliability in vehicular edge computing. The framework modules perform computational resources discovery, contextual data gathering, computation tasks distribution, and failure recovery. Its main part is a task assignment algorithm that seeks the best possible server to execute each application task, using contextual information and WAVE and 5G networks. The results of extensive experiments in different vehicular environments show that our framework reduces up to 70.3% of total execution time compared to totally local execution and up to 42.9% compared to other literature approaches. Concerning reliability, our framework achieves to offload up to 89.4% of all tasks and needs to recover only 0.8% of them. Thus, our solution outperforms the totally local execution of the application and other existing computation offloading solutions.

Exploring computation offloading in IoT systems

Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm raises challenges for devising efficient strategies that offload applications to the fog or the cloud layer while ensuring the optimal response time for a service.Traditional computation offloading policies assume the response time is only dominated by the execution time. However, the response time is a function of many factors including contextual parameters and application characteristics that can change over time.For the computation offloading problem, the majority of existing literature presents efficient solutions considering a limited number of parameters (e.g., computation capacity and network bandwidth) neglecting the effect of the application characteristics and dataflow configuration. In this paper, we explore the impact of the computation offloading on total application response time in three-layer IoT systems considering more realistic parameters, e.g., application characteristics, system complexity, communication cost, and dataflow configuration.This paper also highlights the impact of a new application characteristic parameter defined as Output–Input Data Generation (OIDG) ratio and dataflow configuration on the system behavior.In addition, we present a proof-of-concept end-to-end dynamic computation offloading technique, implemented in a real hardware setup, that observes the aforementioned parameters to perform real-time decision-making.

Trust Enforced Computational Offloading for Health Care Applications in Fog Computing

Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of internet connected devices that generates huge amount of data every day. The usage of IoT devices such as smart wearables, smart phones, smart cities are increasing in the linear scale. Health care is one of the primary applications today that uses IoT devices. Data generated in this application may need computation, storage and data analytics operations which requires resourceful environment for remote patient health monitoring. The data related with health care applications are primarily private and should be readily available to the users. Enforcing these two constraints in cloud environment is a hard task. Fog computing is an emergent architecture for providing computation, storage, control and network services within user’s proximity. To handle private data, the processing elements should be trustable entities in Fog environment. In this paper we propose novel Trust Enforced computation ofFLoading technique for trust worthy applications using fOg computiNg (TEFLON). The proposed system comprises of two algorithms namely optimal service offloader and trust assessment for addressing security and trust issues with reduced response time. And the simulation results show that proposed TEFLON framework improves success rate of fog collaboration with reduced average latency for delay sensitive applications and ensures trust for trustworthy applications.

Energy Efficient UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing for IoT Devices: A Review

With the emergence of computation-intensive and delay-sensitive applications, such as face recognition, virtual reality, augmented reality, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices; Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) allows the IoT devices to offload their heavy computation tasks to nearby edge cloud network rather than to compute the tasks locally. Therefore, it helps to reduce the energy consumption and execution delay in the ground mobile users. Flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) integrated with the MEC server play a key role in 5G and future wireless communication networks to provide spatial coverage and further computational services to the small, battery-powered and energy-constrained devices. The UAV-enabled MEC (U-MEC) system has flexible mobility and more computational capability compared to the terrestrial MEC network. They support line-of-sight (LoS) links with the users offloading their tasks to the UAVs. Hence, users can transmit more data without interference by mitigating small-scale fading and shadowing effects. UAVs resources and flight time are very limited due to size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. Therefore, energy-aware communication and computation resources are allocated in order to minimize energy consumption.In this paper, a brief survey on U-MEC networks is presented. It includes the brief introduction regarding UAVs and MEC technology. The basic terminologies and architectures used in U-MEC networks are also defined. Moreover, mobile edge computation offloading working, different access schemes used during computation offloading technique are explained. Resources that are needed to be optimized in U-MEC systems are depicted with different optimization problem, and solution types. Furthermore, to guide future work in this area of research, future research directions are outlined. At the end, challenges and open issues in this domain are also summarized.

Secure and Optimized Load Balancing for Multitier IoT and Edge-Cloud Computing Systems

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a new computing paradigm with great potential to alleviate resource limitations attributed to mobile device users (MDUs) by offloading intensive computations to ubiquitous MEC server. However, most of the current offloading policies allow MDUs to transmit their tasks to the same connected small base stations (sBSs), which invariably increases latency and limits performance gain due to overload. Moreover, the security issue mitigating sensitive communication of information is not adequately addressed. Therefore, in this study, in addition to proposing a joint load balancing and computation offloading (CO) technique for MEC systems, we introduce a new security layer to circumvent potential security issues. First, a load balancing algorithm for efficient redistribution of MDUs among sBSs is proposed. In addition, a new advanced encryption standard (AES) cryptographic technique suffused with electrocardiogram (ECG) signal-based encryption and decryption key is presented as a security layer to safeguard the vulnerability of data during the transmission. Furthermore, an integrated model of load balancing, CO and security is formulated as a problem whose goal is to decrease the time and energy demands of the system. Detailed experimental results prove that our model with and without the additional security layers can save about 68.2% and 72.4% of system consumption compared to the local execution.

Architectural Design Alternatives Based on Cloud/Edge/Fog Computing for Connected Vehicles

As vehicles playing an increasingly important role in people's daily life, requirements on safer and more comfortable driving experience have arisen. Connected vehicles (CVs) can provide enabling technologies to realize these requirements and have attracted widespread attentions from both academia and industry. These requirements ask for a well-designed computing architecture to support the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of CV applications. Computation offloading techniques, such as cloud, edge, and fog computing, can help CVs process computation-intensive and large-scale computing tasks. Additionally, different cloud/edge/fog computing architectures are suitable for supporting different types of CV applications with highly different QoS requirements, which demonstrates the importance of the computing architecture design. However, most of the existing surveys on cloud/edge/fog computing for CVs overlook the computing architecture design, where they (i) only focus on one specific computing architecture and (ii) lack discussions on benefits, research challenges, and system requirements of different architectural alternatives. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on different architectural design alternatives based on cloud/edge/fog computing for CVs. The contributions of this paper are: (i) providing a comprehensive literature survey on existing proposed architectural design alternatives based on cloud/edge/fog computing for CVs, (ii) proposing a new classification of computing architectures based on cloud/edge/fog computing for CVs: computation-aided and computation-enabled architectures, (iii) presenting a holistic comparison among different cloud/edge/fog computing architectures for CVs based on functional requirements of CV systems, including advantages, disadvantages, and research challenges.

Computation Offloading for Vehicular Environments: A Survey

With significant advances in communication and computing, modern day vehicles are becoming increasingly intelligent. This gives them the ability to contribute to safer roads and passenger comfort through network devices, cameras, sensors, and computational storage and processing capabilities. However, to run new and popular applications, and to enable vehicles operating autonomously requires massive computational resources. Computational resources available with the current day vehicles are not sufficient to process all these demands. In this situation, other vehicles, edge servers, and servers in remote data centers can help the vehicles by lending their computing resources. However, to take advantage of these computing resources, computation offloading techniques have to be leveraged to transfer tasks or entire applications to run on other devices. Such computation offloading can lead to improved performance and Quality of Service (QoS) for applications and for the network. However, computation offloading in a highly dynamic environment such as vehicular networks is a major challenge. Therefore, this survey aims to review and organize the computation offloading literature in vehicular environments. In addition, we demystify some concepts, propose a taxonomy with the most important aspects and classify most works in the area according to each category. We also present the main tools, scenarios, subjects, strategies, objectives, etc., used in the works. Finally, we present the main challenges and future directions to guide future research in this active research area.

Energy-Efficient Computation Offloading for Secure UAV-Edge-Computing Systems

Characterized by their ease of deployment and bird's-eye view, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may be widely deployed both in surveillance and traffic management. However, the moderate computational capability and the short battery life restrict the local data processing at the UAV side. Fortunately, this impediment may be mitigated by employing the mobile-edge computing (MEC) paradigm for offloading demanding computational tasks from the UAV through a wireless transmission link. However, the offloaded information may become compromised by eavesdroppers. To address this issue, we conceive an energy-efficient computation offloading technique for UAV-MEC systems, with an emphasis on physical-layer security. We formulate a number of energy-efficiency problems for secure UAV-MEC systems, which are then transformed to convex problems. Finally, their optimal solutions are found for both active and passive eavesdroppers. Furthermore, the conditions of zero, partial, and full offloading are analyzed from a physical perspective. The numerical results highlight the specific conditions of activating the three abovementioned offloading options and quantify the performance of our proposed offloading strategy in various scenarios.