Fast growth of produced data from deferent smart devices such as smart mobiles, IoT/IIoT networks, and vehicular networks running different specific applications such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and positioning systems, demand more and more processing and storage resources. Offloading is a promising technique to cope with the inherent limitations of such devices by which the resource-intensive code or at least a part of it will be transferred to the nearby resource-rich servers. Different approaches have been proposed to help make better decisions in respect of whether, where, when, and how much to offload and to improve the efficiency of the offloading process in the literature. On the other hand, the dynamic behavior of mobile devices running on-demand applications faces the offloading to the new challenges, which could be described as stochastic behaviors. Therefore, various stochastic offloading models have been proposed in the literature. However, to the best of the author’s knowledge, despite the existence of plenty of related offloading studies in the literature, there is not any systematic, comprehensive, and detailed survey paper focusing on stochastic-based offloading mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a survey paper concerning the stochastic-based offloading approaches in various computation environments such as Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), and Fog Computing (FC) in which to identify new mechanisms, a classical taxonomy is presented. The proposed taxonomy is classified into three main fields: Markov chain, Markov process, and Hidden Markov Models. Then, open issues and future unexplored or inadequately explored research challenges are discussed, and the survey is finally concluded.

A Survey on the Computation Offloading Approaches in Mobile Edge/Cloud Computing Environment: A Stochastic-based Perspective

Achieving long battery lives or even self sustainability has been a long standing challenge for designing mobile devices. This paper presents a novel solution that seamlessly integrates two technologies, mobile cloud computing and microwave power transfer (MPT), to enable computation in passive low-complexity devices such as sensors and wearable computing devices. Specifically, considering a single-user system, a base station (BS) either transfers power to or offloads computation from a mobile to the cloud; the mobile uses harvested energy to compute given data either locally or by offloading. A framework for energy efficient computing is proposed that comprises a set of policies for controlling CPU cycles for the mode of local computing, time division between MPT and offloading for the other mode of offloading, and mode selection. Given the CPU-cycle statistics information and channel state information (CSI), the policies aim at maximizing the probability of successfully computing given data, called computing probability, under the energy harvesting and deadline constraints. The policy optimization is translated into the equivalent problems of minimizing the mobile energy consumption for local computing and maximizing the mobile energy savings for offloading which are solved using convex optimization theory. The structures of the resultant policies are characterized in closed form. Furthermore, given non-causal CSI, the said analytical framework is further developed to support computation load allocation over multiple channel realizations, which further increases computing probability. Last, simulation demonstrates the feasibility of wirelessly powered mobile cloud computing and the gain of its optimal control.

Energy Efficient Mobile Cloud Computing Powered by Wireless Energy Transfer

Tasks management is a very interesting research topic for various application domains. Tasks may have the form of analytics or any other processing activities over the available data. One of the main concerns is to efficiently allocate and execute tasks to produce meaningful results that will facilitate any decision making. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing (EC) defines new requirements for tasks management. Such requirements are related to the dynamic environment where IoT devices and EC nodes act and process the collected data. The statistics of data and the status of IoT/EC nodes are continuously updated. In this paper, we propose a demand- and uncertainty-driven tasks management scheme with the target to allocate the computational burden to the appropriate places. As the proper place, we consider the local execution of a task in an EC node or its offloading to a peer node. We provide the description of the problem and give details for its solution. The proposed mechanism models the demand for each task and efficiently selects the place where it will be executed. We adopt statistical learning and fuzzy logic to support the appropriate decision when tasks’ execution is requested by EC nodes. Our experimental evaluation involves extensive simulations for a set of parameters defined in our model. We provide numerical results and reveal that the proposed scheme is capable of deciding on the fly while concluding the most efficient allocation.

A Demand-driven, Proactive Tasks Management Model at the Edge

In recent years, Fog Computing (FC) is known as a good infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). Using this architecture for the mobile applications in the IoT is named the Mobile Fog Computing (MFC). If we assume that an application includes some modules, thus, these modules can be sent to the Fog or Cloud layer because of the resource limitation or increased runtime at the mobile. This increases the efficiency of the whole system. As data is entered sequentially, and the input is given to the modules, the number of executable modules increases. So, this research is conducted to find the best place in order to run the modules that can be on the mobile, Fog, or Cloud. According to the proposed method, when the modules arrive at gateway, then, a Hidden Markov model Auto-scaling Offloading (HMAO) finds the best destination to execute the module to create a compromise between the energy consumption and execution time of the modules. The evaluation results obtained regarding the parameters of the energy consumption, execution cost, delay, and network resource usage shows that the proposed method on average is better than the local execution, First-Fit (FF), and Q-learning based method.

A latency-aware and energy-efficient computation offloading in mobile fog computing: a hidden Markov model-based approach

SummaryInternet of Things (IoT) is an ecosystem that can improve the life quality ofhumans through smart services, thereby facilitating everyday tasks. Connectingto cloud and utilizing its servi

A dynamic fog service provisioning approach for IoT applications

Mobile edge computing (MEC) provides cloud-computing services for mobile devices to offload intensive computation tasks to the physically proximal MEC servers. In this paper, we consider a multiserver system where a single mobile device asks for computation offloading to multiple nearby servers. We formulate this offloading problem as the joint optimization of computation task assignment and CPU frequency scaling, in order to minimize a tradeoff between task execution time and mobile energy consumption. The resulting optimization problem is combinatorial in essence, and the optimal solution generally can only be obtained by exhaustive search with extremely high complexity. Leveraging the Markov approximation technique, we propose a light-weight algorithm that can provably converge to a bounded near-optimal solution. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is able to generate near-optimal solutions and outperform other benchmark algorithms.

Yiming Li

Papers

Markov Approximation for Task Offloading and Computation Scaling in Mobile Edge Computing