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Online computation offloading for deadline-aware tasks in edge computing

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Abstract

Edge computing provides task offloading services to extend the computational capacity of mobile users and reduce task latency. Prior studies mainly focus on tasks with strict deadlines. However, in the real world, some tasks may not always have to be finished before hard deadlines, e.g., multimedia tasks. Tasks with soft deadlines can miss their primary deadlines, but not by too much, and still be timely. This has not been properly considered by existing offloading approaches. In this paper, we propose CONFECT, a novel offloading approach that handles tasks with mixtures of hard deadlines and soft deadlines. Specifically, we first formulate the problem as an integer linear programming and prove its hardness. Then, we propose two online algorithms with proven competitive ratios to solve the problem collectively, including an algorithm that assigns tasks to edge servers to maximize the task completion ratio and an algorithm that adjusts the task execution order to maximize the task completion revenue. Moreover, to balance the fairness among tasks and system revenue elastically, we extend CONFECT by using a tunable fairness knob. Finally, extensive experiments show that CONFECT outperforms five baseline algorithms in terms of task completion ratio and completion revenue.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2020YFB1707600, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant No. BK20 201248, the Open Fund of PDL under Grant No. WDZC20205500109, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61802172, and the Program A for Outstanding Ph.D. Candidates of Nanjing University under Grant No.202001A014. The corresponding author is Wanchun Dou.

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  1. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Xin He, Jiaqi Zheng, Haipeng Dai, Bowen Liu, Wanchun Dou & Guihai Chen

  2. School of Software and Electrical Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

    Qiang He

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  1. Xin He
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He, X., Zheng, J., He, Q. et al. Online computation offloading for deadline-aware tasks in edge computing. Wireless Netw 30, 4073–4092 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-021-02864-z

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