Iterative Dynamic Critical Path Scheduling: An Efficient Technique for Offloading Task Graphs in Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift from centralized cloud computing to decentralized edge computing. As a key enabler technique in edge computing, computation offloading migrates computation-intensive tasks from resource-limited devices to nearby devices, optimizing service latency and energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate the problem of offloading task graphs in edge computing scenarios. Previous work based on list-scheduling heuristics is likely to suffer from severe processor time wastage due to intricate task dependencies and data transfer requirements. To this end, we propose a novel offloading algorithm, referred to as Iterative Dynamic Critical Path Scheduling (IDCP). IDCP minimizes the makespan by iteratively migrating tasks to keep shortening the dynamic critical path. Through IDCP, what is managed are essentially the sequences among tasks, including task dependencies and scheduled sequences on processors. Since we only schedule sequences here, the actual start time of each task is not fixed during the scheduling process, which effectively helps to avoid unfavorable schedules. Such flexibilities also offer us much space for continuous scheduling optimizations. Our experimental results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing list-scheduling heuristics in various scenarios, which demonstrates the effectiveness and competitiveness of our algorithm.