Cloud and Edge Computation Offloading for Latency Limited Services

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is recognised as a solution in future networks to offload computation and data storage from mobile and IoT devices to the servers at the edge of mobile networks. It reduces the network traffic and service latency compared to passing all data to cloud data centers while offering greater processing power than handling tasks locally at terminals. Since MEC servers are scattered throughout the radio access network, their computation capacities are modest in comparison to large cloud data centers. Therefore, offloading decision between MEC and cloud server should minimize the usage of the resources while maximizing the number of accepted delay critical requests. In this work we formulate the joint optimization of communication and computation resources allocation for computation offloading (CO) requests with strict latency constraints. We show that the global optimization problem is NP-hard and propose an efficient heuristic solution based on the single user optimal solution. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, compared to optimal and baseline solution where tasks are allocated in the order of arrival, with different system parameters. They show that our algorithm performs close to the optimal in terms of resource utilization and outperforms the baseline algorithm in terms of acceptance rate.