Optimal Task Offloading Policy in Edge Computing Systems with Firm Deadlines
Khai Doan, Wesley Araujo, Evangelos Kranakis, Ioannis Lambadaris, Yannis Viniotis · 2023
Task migration to remote servers offers a promising solution to the congestion issue in mobile edge computing systems. Our optimal task offloading design minimizes a system cost function, encompassing offloading and penalty costs. The offloading cost reflects external server resource usage, while the penalty cost accounts for task expiration risk. To optimize the expected cost over a time horizon, we employ Dynamic Programming (DP) and analyze its properties for an optimal offloading policy. “Curse of Dimensionality” of the DP equation poses computational challenges, especially with infinite state space. To mitigate this, we identify crucial policy properties, enabling DP evaluation on a finite state subset. Moreover, we show that the computation of the optimal task offloading decision at a given state can be deduced by leveraging the optimal decision taken at its “adjacent” states. We then provide numerical results to demonstrate parameter impact and validate theoretical findings.