Computational Offloading of Service Workflow in Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) sinks the functions and services of cloud computing to the edge of the network to provide users with storage and computing resources. For workflow tasks, the interdependency and the sequence constraint being among the tasks make the offloading strategy more complicated. To obtain the optimal offloading and scheduling scheme for workflow tasks to minimize the total energy consumption of the system, a workflow task offloading and scheduling scheme based on an improved genetic algorithm is proposed in an MEC network with multiple users and multiple virtual machines (VMs). Firstly, the system model of the offloading and scheduling of workflow tasks in a multi-user and multi-VMs MEC network is built. Then, the problem of how to determine the optimal offloading and scheduling scheme of workflow to minimize the total energy consumption of the system while meeting the deadline constraint is formulated. To solve this problem, the improved genetic algorithm is adopted to obtain the optimal offloading strategy and scheduling. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a lower energy consumption than other benchmark schemes.