Users' experience matter: Delay sensitivity-aware computation offloading in mobile edge computing

Abstract

As a promising computing paradigm, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) provides communication and computing capability at the edge of the network to address the concerns of massive computation requirements, constrained battery capacity and limited bandwidth of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Most existing works on mobile edge task ignores the delay sensitivities, which may lead to the degraded utility of computation offloading and dissatisfied users. In this paper, we study the delay sensitivity-aware computation offloading by jointly considering both user's tolerance towards delay of task execution and the network status under computation and communication constraints. Specifically, we use a specific multi-user and multi-server MEC system to define the latency sensitivity of task offloading based on the analysis of delay distribution of task categories. Then, we propose a scoring mechanism to evaluate the sensitivity-dependent utility of task execution and devise a Centralized Iterative Redirection Offloading (CIRO) algorithm to collect all information in the MEC system. By starting with an initial offloading strategy, the CIRO algorithm enables IoT devices to cooperate and iteratively redirect task offloading decisions to optimize the offloading strategy until it converges. Extensive simulation results show that our method can significantly improve the utility of computation offloading in MEC systems and has lower time complexity than existing algorithms.