Task Offloading with Uncertain Processing Cycles
Published in ACM MobiHoc, 2021
Abstract: Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has emerged to be an integral com- ponent of 5G infrastructure due to its potential to speed up task processing and reduce energy consumption for mobile devices. However, a major technical challenge in making offloading deci- sions is that the number of required processing cycles of a task is usually unknown in advance. Due to this processing uncertainty, it is difficult to make offloading decisions while providing any guar- antee on task deadlines. To address this challenge, we propose EPD—Energy-minimized solution with Probabilistic Deadline guar- antee to task offloading problem. The mathematical foundation of EPD is Exact Conic Reformulation (ECR), which is a powerful tool that reformulates a probabilistic constraint for task deadline into a deterministic one. In the absence of distribution knowledge of processing cycles, we use the estimated mean and variance of pro- cessing cycles and exploit ECR to the fullest extent in the design of EPD. Simulation results show that EPD successfully guarantees the probabilistic deadlines while minimizing the energy consumption of mobile users, and can achieve significant improvement in energy saving when compared to a state-of-the-art approach.