Dynamic adaptive workload offloading strategy in mobile edge computing networks

With the increasing popularity of mobile devices and explosive growth of task processing requirements, edge computing attracts more attention from researchers nowadays since it can improve the QoS and utilize resources of the cloudlets, including mobile devices and base stations, as much as possible. In a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) network, the workload offloading problem is quite important since it directly influences the latency of the task processing, and many efficient algorithms have been proposed to deal with it. However, most of the existing algorithms only consider the static or quasi-static scenario, and are not suitable for a system with several fast-moving devices. Since that more and more mobile devices with high speed are involved in a MEC system, a new workload offloading strategy is required to adapt to such a dynamic scenario. In this paper, we sufficient consider the dynamic properties of a MEC system, and proposed a dynamic adaptive workload offloading algorithm based on Lyapunov theories and an FC-LSTM based schedule determining algorithm to balance the workload of different cloudlets and minimize the weighted average energy and time consumption of mobile devices. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results show that all the proposed algorithms achieve high performance in terms of energy consumption, convergence and latency.