A Socially-Aware Dependent Tasks Offloading Strategy in Mobile Edge Computing

With the advent of 5G, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), a promising computing paradigm sits closer to users than cloud computing, is being broadly used in various Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and achieve high-quality user experience. Task offloading, as a critical research issue in MEC, is playing an important role in optimizing computational resources and management. However, many tasks are executed dependent on the computational results of other tasks. Moreover, in the case of offloading tasks with other devices, it is often required to consider the success rate of offloading, since not all users are willing to lend their mobile devices to others for task execution. To address this challenge, by taking social relationships between users into account, this paper intends to combine computational resources of local devices and edge clouds and provide more flexible offloading and execution solutions, for achieving the efficient offloading of dependent tasks with the joint consideration of network latency and energy consumption. This paper develops a dependent task offloading strategy based on Bipartite Graph Matching. Extensive simulations are conducted for validating the effectiveness of our proposed strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed strategy can significantly minimize the overhead compared with other baseline strategies. In particular, the overhead is reduced 8.2%, compared with the strategy which consider the Device-to-Device (D2D) offloading only.