A Novel Mobility-Aware Offloading Management Scheme in Sustainable Multi-Access Edge Computing

Abstract

The concept of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) extends the provisioning of computing and storage capabilities from remote Cloud Data Centers (DC) to the proximity of end users via heterogeneous networks. By augmenting User Equipment (UE) with external computing power under the local coverage, Cloudlet-based offloading performs as a critical enabler to boost application execution performance and to prolong battery lifespan in the mobile devices. However, the mobility of UEs introduces intra-Cloudlet intermittent connections and inter-Cloudlet unbalanced load distributions in the MEC environment, which consequently leads to offloading failures and service downgrading. In this paper, we propose a novel MEC-based mobility-aware offloading model to solve the intra-Cloudlet offloading scheduling issue and inter-Cloudlet load-aware heterogeneous resource allocation issue in terms of concerning the offloading execution efficiency, task processing time constraints, and energy efficiency. A priority-based queue model is designed to formulate the intra-Cloudlet mobility-aware offloading scheduling problem, resolved by the adoption of the Particle Swarm heuristic. The energy-aware inter-Cloudlet resource selection procedure is formalized in a mobility-aware multi-site resource allocation model, which is further solved by lightweight dynamic load balancing. The results of the experiment indicate that the proposed framework can effectively improve the overall offloading service provisioning quality in the intra-Cloudlet and inter-Cloudlet offloading scenarios, compared to the current works.