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

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.