TOFFEE: Task Offloading and Frequency Scaling for Energy Efficiency of Mobile Devices in Mobile Edge Computing

• Published in: IEEE transactions on cloud computing Vol. 9; no. 4; pp. 1634 - 1644
• Main Authors: Chen, Ying, Zhang, Ning, Zhang, Yongchao, Chen, Xin, Wu, Wen, Shen, Xuemin Sherman
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE Computer Society 01.10.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Cloud computing; Computation offloading; Data communication; dynamic frequency scaling; Edge computing; Electronic devices; Energy consumption; Energy efficiency; Mobile computing; Mobile edge computing; Mobile handsets; Optimization; Performance evaluation; Provisioning; Queues; Resource management; task allocation; Task analysis; Wireless communication
• DOI: 10.1109/TCC.2019.2923692
• ISSN: 2168-7161

As an emerging computing paradigm, mobile edge computing (MEC) can improve users' service experience by provisioning the cloud resources close to the mobile devices. With MEC, computation-intensive tasks can be processed on the MEC servers, which can greatly decrease the mobile devices' energy consumption and prolong their battery lifetime. However, the highly dynamic task arrival and wireless channel states pose great challenges on the computation task allocation in MEC. This paper jointly investigates the task allocation and CPU-cycle frequency, to achieve the minimum energy consumption while guaranteeing that the queue length is upper bounded. We formulate it as a stochastic optimization problem, and with the aid of stochastic optimization methods, we decouple the original problem into two deterministic optimization subproblems. An online Task Offloading and Frequency Scaling for Energy Efficiency (TOFFEE) algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal solutions of these subproblems concurrently. TOFFEE can obtain the close-to-optimal energy consumption while bounding the applications' queue length. Performance evaluation is conducted which verifies TOFFEE's effectiveness. Experiment results indicate that TOFFEE can decrease the energy consumption by about 15 percent compared with the RLE algorithm, and by about 38 percent compared with the RME algorithm.