Performance evaluation and optimization of a task offloading strategy on the mobile edge computing with edge heterogeneity

With the development for the technology of mobile edge computing (MEC) and the grave situation for the shortage of global energy, the problem of computation offloading in a cloud computing framework is getting more attention by network managers. In order to improve the experience quality of users and increase the energy efficiency of the system, we focus on the issue of task offloading strategy in MEC system. In this paper, we propose a task offloading strategy in the MEC system with a heterogeneous edge. By considering the execution and transmission of tasks under the task offloading strategy, we present an architecture for the MEC system. We establish a system model composed of M/M/1, M/M/ c and M/M/ ∞ queues to capture the execution process of tasks in local mobile device (MD), MEC server and remote cloud servers, respectively. Moreover, by trading off the average delay of tasks, the energy consumption level of the MD and the offloading expend of the system, we construct a cost function for serving one task and formulate a joint optimization problem for the task offloading strategy accordingly. Furthermore, under the constraints of steady state and proportion scope, we use the Lagrangian function and the corresponding Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) condition to obtain the optimal task offloading strategy with the minimum system cost. Finally, we carry out numerical experiments on the MEC system to investigate the influence of system parameters on the task offloading strategy and to obtain the optimal results. The experiment results show that the task offloading strategy proposed in this paper can balance the average delay, the energy consumption level and the offloading expend with the optimal allocation ratio.