Mobile-edge Computation Offloading Research Articles

Truthful Auction-Based Resource Allocation Mechanisms With Flexible Task Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

Truthful Auction-Based Resource Allocation Mechanisms With Flexible Task Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

Task graph offloading via deep reinforcement learning in mobile edge computing

Various mobile applications that comprise dependent tasks are gaining widespread popularity and are increasingly complex. These applications often have low-latency requirements, resulting in a significant surge in demand for computing resources. With the emergence of mobile edge computing (MEC), it becomes the most significant issue to offload the application tasks onto small-scale devices deployed at the edge of the mobile network for obtaining a high-quality user experience. However, since the environment of MEC is dynamic, most existing works focusing on task graph offloading, which rely heavily on expert knowledge or accurate analytical models, fail to fully adapt to such environmental changes, resulting in the reduction of user experience. This paper investigates the task graph offloading in MEC, considering the time-varying computation capabilities of edge computing devices. To adapt to environmental changes, we model the task graph scheduling for computation offloading as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Then, we design a deep reinforcement learning algorithm (SATA-DRL) to learn the task scheduling strategy from the interaction with the environment, to improve user experience. Extensive simulations validate that SATA-DRL is superior to existing strategies in terms of reducing average makespan and deadline violation.

An expert system for hybrid edge to cloud computational offloading in heterogeneous MEC–MCC environments

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) integrates cloud computing into the mobile environment, effectively tackling performance, environmental, and security constraints. However, the proliferation of clouds and applications introduces complexities in offloading decisions. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged as a solution to bolster MCC performance, capitalizing on the proximity to edge devices. However, optimizing computation offloading remains paramount for heterogeneous smart (mobile phones, wearables, and IoT) devices, necessitating efficient utilization of network resources and computational offloading. To address these challenges, this paper introduces NSANNOM (Network and Device Resources Utilization through Smart ANN-based Offloading Mechanism), an expert system designed for optimal computational offloading decision-making and efficient network resource allocation mechanisms. NSANNOM employs Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for precise decision-making by validating real-world datasets, underscoring ANN’s superiority over existing algorithms, and showcasing enhanced energy savings, cost efficiency, and latency response. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed ANN model for the offloading decision-making algorithm achieves a training accuracy of 97% and a validation accuracy of 99%. The system consumes minimal energy (10 MJ) for task scheduling and exhibits remarkable accuracy in resource utilization across multiple tasks (10–50) ranging in size (from 1 to 16 GB). Additionally, it minimizes time delays (in milliseconds) during the offloading process.

Hybrid learning of predictive mobile-edge computation offloading under differently-aged network states

By offloading computationally demanding applications to edge servers, mobile edge computing (MEC) can alleviate the stringent hardware requirements and save energy consumption of resource-restrained devices. Mobile edge computation offloading (MECO, i.e., optimizing computation offloading and resource allocation) is critical to the performance of MEC. However, the existing study typically assumed the availability of all the network states for the upcoming time slot, not applicable in practical MECO with differently-aged network states (e.g., fast-changing practical wireless channels and instantly observable local task arrivals). This paper proposes a novel hybrid learning approach that optimizes the instantaneous local processing and predictive computation offloading decisions. We establish a new hybrid learning approach for instantaneous local processing and predictive computation offloading decisions by integrating the learning techniques of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and online convex optimization (OCO). By decomposing the primal problems, the proposed approach can be implemented in a decentralized manner. We prove that the optimality loss resulting from the differently-aged network states can diminish with the decreasing stepsizes of SGD and OCO. Simulation results validate the asymptotic optimality and superiority of the proposed hybrid learning approach, as compared to state-of-the-art (e.g., based on OCO techniques).

A Multiagent Meta-Based Task Offloading Strategy for Mobile-Edge Computing

Task offloading in mobile edge computing (MEC) improves the efficacy of mobile devices in terms of computing performance, data storage, and energy consumption by offloading computational tasks to edge servers. Efficient task offloading can leverage MEC technology to reduce task processing latency and energy consumption. By integrating the reasoning ability and machine intelligence of the cognitive computing architecture, such as SOAR and ACT-R, reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been applied to resolve the task offloading in MEC. To solve the problem that conventional Deep RL (DRL) algorithms cannot adapt to dynamic environments, this paper proposed a task offloading scheduling strategy which combined multi-agent reinforcement learning and meta-learning. In order to make the two actions of charging time and offloading strategy fully considered at the same time, we implemented a learning network of two agent on a mobile device. To efficiently train the policy network, we proposed a first order approximation method based on clipped surrogate objective. Finally, the experiments are designed with variety of the number of subtasks, transmission rate, and edge server performance, and the results show that the MRL-based strategy has the overwhelming overall performance and can be quickly applied in various environments with good stability and generalization.

A mechanism for network resource allocation and task offloading in mobile edge computing and network engineering

AbstractAt present, most of the resource allocation methods in mobile edge computing allocate computing resources according to the time order in which task requests are calculated and unloaded, without considering the priority of tasks in practical applications. According to the computing requirements in such cases, a priority task‐oriented resource allocation method is proposed. According to the average processing time of the task execution, the corresponding priority for task is given. The tasks with different priorities are weighted to allocate computing resources, which not only ensures that the high‐priority tasks obtain sufficient computing resources, but also reduces the total time and energy consumption to complete the calculation of all tasks, thus improving the quality of service. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance.

An Efficient Algorithm for Resource Allocation in Mobile Edge Computing Based on Convex Optimization and Karush–Kuhn–Tucker Method

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is receiving more attention than centralized cloud computing due to the massive increase in transmission and compute requirements in 5G vehicle networks. It offers a significant amount of processing and storage resources to the edge of networks, offloading applications from vehicle terminals that are computation-intensive and delay-sensitive. For devices with limited resources, it uses edge resources to provide computationally heavy operations while conserving energy. This paper proposes a novel approach for computing offloading in MEC. To effectively optimize the MEC resources, this paper proposes a novel algorithm. First, the joint optimization and service cache decision subproblems were determined from continuous and discrete variables. Then, the near-optimal solution is determined from the subproblems through convex optimization and Karush–Kuhn–Tucker method. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better computational offloading and resource allocation performance as compared to existing algorithms.

A PDDQNLP Algorithm for Energy Efficient Computation Offloading in UAV-Assisted MEC

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology to provide computational services to ground terminal devices (TDs) in remote areas or for emergency incidents with its flexibility and mobility. This paper aims to maximize the UAV’s energy efficiency while considering the fairness of offloading. We formulate this optimization problem by jointly considering the UAV flight time, the UAV 3D trajectory, the TD binary offloading decisions, and the time allocated to TDs, which is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem. The problem is transformed into two sub-problems and we propose a PDDQNLP (parametrized dueling deep Q-network and linear programming) algorithm based on the combination of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and linear programming (LP) to address them. For the first sub-problem, a DRL-based algorithm is used to optimize the TD offloading decisions, the UAV trajectory, and the UAV flight time. The action space is hybrid that contains discrete actions (e.g., binary offloading) and continuous actions (e.g., UAV flight time). Therefore, we parameterize the action space and propose the PDDQN algorithm, which combines the DDPG algorithm for handling the continuous action space and the Dueling DQN algorithm for handling the discrete action space. According to the solution obtained from the first sub-problem, the LP is used to adjust the time allocated to TDs in the second sub-problem. The numerical results show that the PDDQNLP algorithm outperforms its counterparts.

ADRLO: Adaptive deep reinforcement learning-based offloading for edge computing

Computation offloading, as an efficient and promising computing paradigm for mobile edge computing (MEC), provides optimal computation allocation between MEC servers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, in modern wireless communications, most of the computational tasks are latency-sensitive, presenting an efficiency challenge for offloading services. Moreover, to make the best use of computation resources, it remains an issue to ensure stable optimal offloading for the allocation of computation resources. In this paper, a novel adaptive deep reinforcement learning-based offloading (ADRLO) framework is developed to achieve a stable optimal computation revenue with low execution latency for MEC offloading. Structurally, we implement a residual connected deep neural network (DNN) to generate a series of offloading strategies and use them to obtain the global system computation rate. Especially, the strategy that achieves the maximum computation rate is then selected as experience to support the DNN training, forming a closed-loop deep reinforcement learning (DRL) mechanism. To further enhance the efficiency and stability of the MEC offloading, an adaptive regulator is presented for the framework parameters including the size of action space and the DNN learning rate. Numerical results show that, compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches, our proposal achieves optimal computation revenue, exhibits better convergence performance, and significantly reduces the execution latency by almost 50%.

Joint Mobility Control and MEC Offloading for Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial-Network-Enabled Robots

Benefiting from the fusion of communication and intelligent technologies, network-enabled robots have become important to support future machine-assisted and unmanned applications. To provide high-quality services for robots in wide areas, hybrid satellite-terrestrial networks are a key technology. Through hybrid networks, computation-intensive and latency-sensitive tasks can be offloaded to mobile edge computing (MEC) servers. However, due to the mobility of mobile robots and unreliable wireless network environments, excessive local computations and frequent service migrations may significantly increase the service delay. To address this issue, this paper aims to minimize the average task completion time for MEC-based offloading initiated by satellite-terrestrial-network-enabled robots. Different from conventional mobility-aware schemes, the proposed scheme makes the offloading decision by jointly considering the mobility control of robots. A joint optimization problem of task offloading and velocity control is formulated. Using Lyapunov optimization, the original optimization is decomposed into a velocity control subproblem and a task offloading subproblem. Then, based on the Markov decision process (MDP), a dual-agent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is proposed. The convergence and complexity of the improved RL algorithm are theoretically analyzed, and the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the offloading delay.

Performance Analysis of Task Offloading in Mobile Edge Cloud Computing for Brain Tumor Classification Using Deep Learning

The increasing prevalence of brain tumors necessitates accurate and efficient methods for their identification and classification. While deep learning (DL) models have shown promise in this domain, their computational demands pose challenges when deploying them on resource-constrained mobile devices. This paper investigates the potential of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Task Offloading to improve the performance of DL models for brain tumor classification. A comprehensive framework was developed, considering the computational capabilities of mobile devices and edge servers, as well as communication costs associated with task offloading. Various factors influencing task offloading decisions were analyzed, including model size, available resources, and network conditions. Results demonstrate that task offloading effectively reduces the time and energy required to process DL models for brain tumor classification, while maintaining accuracy. The study emphasizes the need to balance computation and communication costs when deciding on task offloading. These findings have significant implications for the development of efficient mobile edge computing systems for medical applications. Leveraging MEC and Task Offloading enables healthcare professionals to utilize DL models for brain tumor classification on resource-constrained mobile devices, ensuring accurate and timely diagnoses. These technological advancements pave the way for more accessible and efficient medical solutions in the future.

Optimal Computation Offloading in Collaborative LEO-IoT Enabled MEC: A Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Recently, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite-based Internet of Things (LEO-IoT) becomes attractive for computation offloading in mobile-edge computing (MEC) since it can overcome terrain obstacles, such as in depopulated villages and disaster sites. However, it is extremely hard to allocate bandwidth and power resources jointly with multiple users and satellites. In this paper, we study offloading in collaborative LEO-IoT where satellites forward data from users to the MEC server, with the goal of making offloading fast and energy efficient. To achieve this goal, we first define the data offloading in collaborative LEO-IoT as an optimization problem with resource constraints. Then we formulate the optimization problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP), which differs from the existing Markov Decision Processes (MDP) work for the offloading scenario. We further propose a novel Multi-Agent Information Broadcasting and Judging (MAIBJ) algorithm to allocate resources in a collaborative manner. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted with various configurations and the results show that MAIBJ can shorten at least 33% of transmission latency and save at least 42% of energy consumption compared with several baseline algorithms.

Computing Offloading Strategy in Mobile Edge Computing Environment: A Comparison between Adopted Frameworks, Challenges, and Future Directions

With the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the development of wireless communication technologies such as 5G, new types of services are emerging and mobile data traffic is growing exponentially. The mobile computing model has shifted from traditional cloud computing to mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure QoS. The main feature of MEC is to “sink” network resources to the edge of the network to meet the needs of delay-sensitive and computation-intensive services, and to provide users with better services. Computation offloading is one of the major research issues in MEC. In this paper, we summarize the state of the art in task offloading in MEC. First, we introduce the basic concepts and typical application scenarios of MEC, and then we formulate the task offloading problem. In this paper, we analyze and summarize the state of research in the industry in terms of key technologies, schemes, scenarios, and objectives. Finally, we provide an outlook on the challenges and future research directions of computational offloading techniques and indicate the suggested direction of follow-up research work.

A Deep Learning-Based Algorithm for Energy and Performance Optimization of Computational Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has produced incredible outcomes in the context of computationally intensive mobile applications by offloading computation to a neighboring server to limit the energy usage of user equipment (UE). However, choosing a pool of application components to offload in addition to the volume of data transfer along with the latency in communication is an intricate issue. In this article, we introduce a novel energy-efficient offloading scheme based on deep neural networks. The proposed scheme trains an intelligent decision-making model that picks a robust pool of application components. The selection is based on factors such as the remaining UE battery power, network conditions, the volume of data transfer, required energy by the application components, postponements in communication, and computational load. We have designed the cost function taking all the mentioned factors, get the cost for all conceivable combinations of component offloading decisions, pick the robust decisions over an extensive dataset, and train a deep neural network as a substitute for the exhaustive computations associated. Model outcomes illustrate that our proposed scheme is proficient in the context of accuracy, root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and energy usage of UE.

BiLSTM-based Federated Learning Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation Algorithm in MEC

Mobile edge computing (MEC) driven by 5G cellular systems has recently emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling mobile devices (MDs) with limited computing resources to offload various computation-intensive tasks (such as autopilot, online game) to edge servers to enhance the data processing capabilities of MDs. However, the uncertainty of wireless channel state and data volume of offloading tasks, as well as the data security privacy of offloading tasks, bring serious challenges to computation offloading in MEC. In this article, we consider a time-varying MEC scenario and formalize the delay and energy consumption during the computation offloading process as a joint optimization problem. Then the optimization problem is decomposed into two sub-problems: intelligent task prediction and resource allocation. Different from traditional methods, we improve the federated learning (FL) algorithm and propose a thoughtful cloud-edge-client FL task prediction mechanism based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory. Each participating MD trains the model locally without uploading data to the server, and periodically aggregates the model in the edge and in the cloud. The algorithm both eliminates the need to solve complex optimization problems and ensures user privacy security. Finally, experimental results show that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms other benchmark algorithms in energy efficiency.

Cooperative Computational Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing for Vehicles: A Model-Based DNN Approach

Many advancements are being made in vehicular networks, such as self-driving, dynamic route scheduling, real-time traffic condition monitoring, and on-board infotainment services. However, these services require high computation power and precision and can be met using mobile edge computing (MEC) mechanisms for vehicular networks. MEC operates through the edge servers available at the roadside, also known as roadside units (RSU). MEC is very useful for vehicular networks because it has extremely low latency and supports operations that require near-real-time access to rapidly changing data. This paper proposes an efficient computational offloading, smart division of tasks, and cooperation among RSUs to increase service performance and decrease the delay in a vehicular network via MEC. The computational delay is further reduced by parallel processing. In the division of tasks, each task is divided into two sub-components which are fed to a deep neural network (DNN) for training. Consequently, this reduces the overall time delay and overhead. We also adopt an efficient routing policy to deliver the results through the shortest path to improve service reliability. The offloading, computing, division, and routing policies are formulated, and a model-based DNN approach is used to obtain an optimal solution. Simulation results prove that our proposed approach is suitable in a dynamic environment. We also compare our results with the existing state-of-the-art, showing that our proposed approach outperforms the existing schemes.

Delay Minimization for NOMA-mmW Scheme-Based MEC Offloading

Upon exploiting massive spectrum resources, millimeter-wave (mmW) communication can significantly improve the transmission rate of mobile-edge computing (MEC) offloading, whereas the directional mmW links are constrained by shrunk beam coverage and demand extra phase for beam alignment. To enhance the accessing efficiency, we develop the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme-based mmW MEC mechanism, namely, NOMA-mmW MEC, therefore motivating to minimize the average delay of the MEC offloading, by jointly optimizing the beamwidth, user equipment (UE) scheduling, and transmit power. To tackle the mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem of delay minimization, we develop the alternative optimization (AO) approach-based RA scheme, namely, AO-RA, to obtain the close-optimum solutions. In the AO-RA scheme, we propose the matrix control many-to-one with externality (MC-M2OE) algorithm, to find the best UE scheduling for the NOMA groupings of different types of UEs. Upon the above, we further design the joint beamwidth and transmit power (JBTP) algorithm, which determines the optimal beamwidth and transmit power for the MEC offloading transmissions. Our simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed AO-RA scheme in minimizing the offloading delay, where our MC-M2OE and JBTP algorithms can significantly outperform the existing approaches. From the simulation results, we may conclude that it needs to carefully address the tradeoff between beam alignment overhead and transmission gain while properly balancing the loading among different NOMA groups, for the practical consideration of NOMA-mmW MEC technology.

A deep reinforcement learning-based wireless body area network offloading optimization strategy for healthcare services.

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is widely adopted in healthcare services, providing remote real-time and continuous healthcare monitoring. With the massive increase of detective sensor data, WBAN is largely restricted by limited storage and computation capacity, resulting in severely decreased efficiency and reliability. Mobile edge computing (MEC) technique can be combined with WBAN to resolve this issue. This paper studies the joint optimization problem of computational offloading and resource allocation (JCORA) in MEC for healthcare service scenarios. We formulate JCORA as a Markov decision process and propose a deep deterministic policy gradient-based WBAN offloading strategy (DDPG-WOS) to optimize time delay and energy consumption in interfered transmission channels. This scheme employs MEC to mitigate the computation pressure on a single WBAN and increase the transmission ability. Further, DDPG-WOS optimizes the offloading strategy-making process by considering the channel condition, transmission quality, computation ability and energy consumption. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed optimization schema in reducing energy consumption and computation latency and increasing the utility of WBAN compared to two competitive solutions.

Identity-Based Edge Computing Anonymous Authentication Protocol

With the development of sensor technology and wireless communication technology, edge computing has a wider range of applications. The privacy protection of edge computing is of great significance. In the edge computing system, in order to ensure the credibility of the source of terminal data, mobile edge computing (MEC) needs to verify the signature of the terminal node on the data. During the signature process, the computing power of edge devices such as wireless terminals can easily become the bottleneck of system performance. Therefore, it is very necessary to improve efficiency through computational offloading. Therefore, this paper proposes an identity-based edge computing anonymous authentication protocol. The protocol realizes mutual authentication and obtains a shared key by encrypting the mutual information. The encryption algorithm is implemented through a thresholded identity-based proxy ring signature. When a large number of terminals offload computing, MEC can set the priority of offloading tasks according to the user’s identity and permissions, thereby improving offloading efficiency. Security analysis shows that the scheme can guarantee the anonymity and unforgeability of signatures. The probability of a malicious node forging a signature is equivalent to cracking the discrete logarithm puzzle. According to the efficiency analysis, in the case of MEC offloading, the computational complexity is significantly reduced, the computing power of edge devices is liberated, and the signature efficiency is improved.

Privacy-Preserving Task Offloading Strategies in MEC

In mobile edge computing (MEC), mobile devices can choose to offload their tasks to edge servers for execution, thereby effectively reducing the completion time of tasks and energy consumption of mobile devices. However, most of the data transfer brought by offloading relies on wireless communication technology, making the private information of mobile devices vulnerable to eavesdropping and monitoring. Privacy leakage, especially the location and association privacies, can pose a significant risk to users of mobile devices. Therefore, protecting the privacy of mobile devices during task offloading is important and cannot be ignored. This paper considers both location privacy and association privacy of mobile devices during task offloading in MEC and targets to reduce the leakage of location and association privacy while minimizing the average completion time of tasks. To achieve these goals, we design a privacy-preserving task offloading scheme to protect location privacy and association privacy. The scheme is mainly divided into two parts. First, we adopt a proxy forwarding mechanism to protect the location privacy of mobile devices from being leaked. Second, we select the proxy server and edge server for each task that needs to be offloaded. In the proxy server selection policy, we make a choice based on the location information of proxy servers, to reduce the leakage risk of location privacy. In the edge server selection strategy, we consider the privacy conflict between tasks, the computing ability, and location of edge servers, to reduce the leakage risk of association privacy plus the average completion time of tasks as much as possible. Simulated experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is effective in protecting the location privacy and association privacy of mobile devices and reducing the average completion time of tasks compared with the-state-of-art techniques.