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Journal ArticleDOI

A Survey of Computation Offloading for Mobile Systems

01 Feb 2013-Mobile Networks and Applications (Springer US)-Vol. 18, Iss: 1, pp 129-140
TL;DR: An overview of the background, techniques, systems, and research areas for offloading computation is provided, and directions for future research are described.
Abstract: Mobile systems have limited resources, such as battery life, network bandwidth, storage capacity, and processor performance. These restrictions may be alleviated by computation offloading: sending heavy computation to resourceful servers and receiving the results from these servers. Many issues related to offloading have been investigated in the past decade. This survey paper provides an overview of the background, techniques, systems, and research areas for offloading computation. We also describe directions for future research.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management is provided in this paper, where a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC are discussed.
Abstract: Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized mobile cloud computing toward mobile edge computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also discuss a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

2,992 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: A comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management and recent standardization efforts on MEC are introduced.
Abstract: Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized Mobile Cloud Computing towards Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also present a research outlook consisting of a set of promising directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

2,289 citations


Cites background from "A Survey of Computation Offloading ..."

  • ...In [92] and [93], general guidelines were developed for determining the offloading decision for the purposes of minimizing the mobile-energy...

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The definition of MEC, its advantages, architectures, and application areas are provided; where the security and privacy issues and related existing solutions are also discussed.
Abstract: Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emergent architecture where cloud computing services are extended to the edge of networks leveraging mobile base stations. As a promising edge technology, it can be applied to mobile, wireless, and wireline scenarios, using software and hardware platforms, located at the network edge in the vicinity of end-users. MEC provides seamless integration of multiple application service providers and vendors toward mobile subscribers, enterprises, and other vertical segments. It is an important component in the 5G architecture which supports variety of innovative applications and services where ultralow latency is required. This paper is aimed to present a comprehensive survey of relevant research and technological developments in the area of MEC. It provides the definition of MEC, its advantages, architectures, and application areas; where we in particular highlight related research and future directions. Finally, security and privacy issues and related existing solutions are also discussed.

1,815 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...are located at a different location [68]....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a low-complexity online algorithm is proposed, namely, the Lyapunov optimization-based dynamic computation offloading algorithm, which jointly decides the offloading decision, the CPU-cycle frequencies for mobile execution, and the transmit power for computing offloading.
Abstract: Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm to meet the ever-increasing computation demands from mobile applications. By offloading the computationally intensive workloads to the MEC server, the quality of computation experience, e.g., the execution latency, could be greatly improved. Nevertheless, as the on-device battery capacities are limited, computation would be interrupted when the battery energy runs out. To provide satisfactory computation performance as well as achieving green computing, it is of significant importance to seek renewable energy sources to power mobile devices via energy harvesting (EH) technologies. In this paper, we will investigate a green MEC system with EH devices and develop an effective computation offloading strategy. The execution cost , which addresses both the execution latency and task failure, is adopted as the performance metric. A low-complexity online algorithm is proposed, namely, the Lyapunov optimization-based dynamic computation offloading algorithm, which jointly decides the offloading decision, the CPU-cycle frequencies for mobile execution, and the transmit power for computation offloading. A unique advantage of this algorithm is that the decisions depend only on the current system state without requiring distribution information of the computation task request, wireless channel, and EH processes. The implementation of the algorithm only requires to solve a deterministic problem in each time slot, for which the optimal solution can be obtained either in closed form or by bisection search. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is shown to be asymptotically optimal via rigorous analysis. Sample simulation results shall be presented to corroborate the theoretical analysis as well as validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

1,385 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The clouds are clearing the clouds away from the true potential and obstacles posed by this computing capability.
Abstract: Clearing the clouds away from the true potential and obstacles posed by this computing capability.

9,282 citations


"A Survey of Computation Offloading ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...An overview of cloud computing, and its potential to influence the future of computing can be found in [6]....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
19 Oct 2003
TL;DR: Xen, an x86 virtual machine monitor which allows multiple commodity operating systems to share conventional hardware in a safe and resource managed fashion, but without sacrificing either performance or functionality, considerably outperform competing commercial and freely available solutions.
Abstract: Numerous systems have been designed which use virtualization to subdivide the ample resources of a modern computer. Some require specialized hardware, or cannot support commodity operating systems. Some target 100% binary compatibility at the expense of performance. Others sacrifice security or functionality for speed. Few offer resource isolation or performance guarantees; most provide only best-effort provisioning, risking denial of service.This paper presents Xen, an x86 virtual machine monitor which allows multiple commodity operating systems to share conventional hardware in a safe and resource managed fashion, but without sacrificing either performance or functionality. This is achieved by providing an idealized virtual machine abstraction to which operating systems such as Linux, BSD and Windows XP, can be ported with minimal effort.Our design is targeted at hosting up to 100 virtual machine instances simultaneously on a modern server. The virtualization approach taken by Xen is extremely efficient: we allow operating systems such as Linux and Windows XP to be hosted simultaneously for a negligible performance overhead --- at most a few percent compared with the unvirtualized case. We considerably outperform competing commercial and freely available solutions in a range of microbenchmarks and system-wide tests.

6,326 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper defines Cloud computing and provides the architecture for creating Clouds with market-oriented resource allocation by leveraging technologies such as Virtual Machines (VMs), and provides insights on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain Service Level Agreement (SLA) oriented resource allocation.

5,850 citations


"A Survey of Computation Offloading ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Several other articles discussing cloud computing applications, research, and implementations can be found in [11, 12, 31, 55, 73, 78]....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
Craig Gentry1
31 May 2009
TL;DR: This work proposes a fully homomorphic encryption scheme that allows one to evaluate circuits over encrypted data without being able to decrypt, and describes a public key encryption scheme using ideal lattices that is almost bootstrappable.
Abstract: We propose a fully homomorphic encryption scheme -- i.e., a scheme that allows one to evaluate circuits over encrypted data without being able to decrypt. Our solution comes in three steps. First, we provide a general result -- that, to construct an encryption scheme that permits evaluation of arbitrary circuits, it suffices to construct an encryption scheme that can evaluate (slightly augmented versions of) its own decryption circuit; we call a scheme that can evaluate its (augmented) decryption circuit bootstrappable.Next, we describe a public key encryption scheme using ideal lattices that is almost bootstrappable.Lattice-based cryptosystems typically have decryption algorithms with low circuit complexity, often dominated by an inner product computation that is in NC1. Also, ideal lattices provide both additive and multiplicative homomorphisms (modulo a public-key ideal in a polynomial ring that is represented as a lattice), as needed to evaluate general circuits.Unfortunately, our initial scheme is not quite bootstrappable -- i.e., the depth that the scheme can correctly evaluate can be logarithmic in the lattice dimension, just like the depth of the decryption circuit, but the latter is greater than the former. In the final step, we show how to modify the scheme to reduce the depth of the decryption circuit, and thereby obtain a bootstrappable encryption scheme, without reducing the depth that the scheme can evaluate. Abstractly, we accomplish this by enabling the encrypter to start the decryption process, leaving less work for the decrypter, much like the server leaves less work for the decrypter in a server-aided cryptosystem.

5,770 citations


"A Survey of Computation Offloading ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Solutions include steganography [47], homomorphic encryption [21, 22], hardware-based secure execution [7]....

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  • ...[21, 22] 2009 Construct a fully homomorphic encryption scheme for any operations...

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
15 Jun 2010
TL;DR: MAUI supports fine-grained code offload to maximize energy savings with minimal burden on the programmer, and decides at run-time which methods should be remotely executed, driven by an optimization engine that achieves the best energy savings possible under the mobile device's current connectivity constrains.
Abstract: This paper presents MAUI, a system that enables fine-grained energy-aware offload of mobile code to the infrastructure. Previous approaches to these problems either relied heavily on programmer support to partition an application, or they were coarse-grained requiring full process (or full VM) migration. MAUI uses the benefits of a managed code environment to offer the best of both worlds: it supports fine-grained code offload to maximize energy savings with minimal burden on the programmer. MAUI decides at run-time which methods should be remotely executed, driven by an optimization engine that achieves the best energy savings possible under the mobile device's current connectivity constrains. In our evaluation, we show that MAUI enables: 1) a resource-intensive face recognition application that consumes an order of magnitude less energy, 2) a latency-sensitive arcade game application that doubles its refresh rate, and 3) a voice-based language translation application that bypasses the limitations of the smartphone environment by executing unsupported components remotely.

2,530 citations


"A Survey of Computation Offloading ..." refers background in this paper

  • ...We assume the size of the program is negligible, or the server may download the program from another site through a high-speed network [17]....

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  • ...2010 [17] Dynamic Present system with fine grained energy-aware code offload capability...

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