A Cooperative Partial Computation Offloading Scheme for Mobile Edge Computing Enabled Internet of Things

Abstract

With the evolutionary development of latency sensitive applications, delay restriction is becoming an obstacle to run sophisticated applications on mobile devices. Partial computation offloading is promising to enable these applications to execute on mobile user equipments with low latency. However, most of the existing researches focus on either cloud computing or mobile edge computing (MEC) to offload tasks. In this paper, we comprehensively consider both of them and it is an early effort to study the cooperation of cloud computing and MEC in Internet of Things. We start from the single user computation offloading problem, where the MEC resources are not constrained. It can be solved by the branch and bound algorithm. Later on, the multiuser computation offloading problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem by considering resource competition among mobile users, which is NP-hard. Due to the computation complexity of the formulated problem, we design an iterative heuristic MEC resource allocation algorithm to make the offloading decision dynamically. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the existing schemes in terms of execution latency and offloading efficiency.