A Node-Selection-Based Sub-Task Assignment Method for Coded Edge Computing

Recently, coded computation has emerged as a promising technique for reducing the influence of straggling computing nodes in distributed computing systems. However, most existing works neglect the time cost of communicating messages from the client to the computing nodes. Besides straggling computing nodes, straggling receivers also have significant influence on the total computing time, especially in edge computing systems, in which the client and the edge computing nodes are connected through wireless links. Motivated by this observation, we propose in this letter, a new sub-task assignment method based on edge node selection to reduce the total computing time for coded edge computing systems. In the proposed method, a sub-task is assigned to the first computing node which decodes the associated messages of the sub-task successfully. Comprehensive numerical results are presented, which show that, with the proposed assignment method, the overall computing time can be reduced. We also show that further reduction can be achieved if additional edge nodes are available.