Collaborative Cloud-Edge-End Task Offloading in Mobile-Edge Computing Networks With Limited Communication Capability

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emerging computing paradigm for enabling low-latency, high-bandwidth and agile mobile services by deploying computing platform at the edge of network. In order to improve the cloud-edge-end processing efficiency of the tasks within the limited computation and communication capabilities, in this article, we investigate the collaborative computation offloading, computation and communication resource allocation scheme, and develop a collaborative computing framework that the tasks of mobile devices (MDs) can be partially processed at the terminals, edge nodes (EN) and cloud center (CC). Then, we propose the pipeline-based offloading scheme, where both MDs and ENs can offload computation-intensive tasks to a particular EN and CC, according to their computation and communication capacities, respectively. Based on the proposed pipeline offloading strategy, a sum latency of all MDs minimization problem is formulated with the consideration of the offloading strategy, computation resource, delivery rate and power allocation, which is a non-convex problem and difficult to deal with. To solve the optimization problem, by using the classic successive convex approximation (SCA) approach, we transform the non-convex optimization problem into the convex one. Finally, simulation results indicate that the proposed collaboration offloading scheme with the pipeline strategy is efficient and outperforms other offloading schemes.