Smart Offloading Computation-intensive & Delay-intensive Tasks of Real-time Workflows in Mobile Edge Computing
Haihong Zhu, Xiaoping Li, Long Chen, Rubén Ruíz · 2023
In MEC, many deadline-constrained real-time work-flows with computation-intensive and/or delay-sensitive tasks are common in intelligent mobile devices (MDs). Though a task can be executed by either the local MD or an MEC server, the tasks of each work-flow are constrained by complex precedences, and real-time task offloading is somewhat tricky. In this paper, we consider the task offloading problem for stochastic work-flows with soft deadline constraints to minimize total tardiness and proposed an online RL-based offloading algorithm. In the algorithm, realtime tasks are dynamically partitioned into partial precedences in terms of which real-time RL states are constructed. Adaptive offloading actions are developed to determine task execution sequences for different states to optimize total tardiness. Experimental results show that the proposed online offloading algorithm outperforms the compared ones.