On Using Edge Computing for Computation Offloading in Mobile Network

Mobile edge computing (MEC) emerges as a promising paradigm that extends the cloud computing to the edge of pervasive radio access networks, in near vicinity to mobile users, reducing drastically the end-to-end access latency to computing resources. Moreover, MEC enables the access to upto-date information on users' network quality via the radio network information service (RNIS) application programming interface (API), allowing to build novel applications tailored to users' context. In this paper, we present a novel framework for offloading computation tasks, from a user device to a server hosted in the mobile edge (ME) with highest CPU availability. Besides taking advantage of the proximity of the MEC server, the main innovation of the proposed solution is to rely on the RNIS API to drive the user equipment (UE) decision to offload or not computing tasks for a given application. The contributions are two-fold. First, the design of an application hosted in the ME, which estimates current value of round trip time (RTT) between the UE and the ME, according to radio quality indicators available through RNIS API, and provide it to the UE. Second, the elaboration of a novel computation algorithm which, based on the estimated RTT coupled with other parameters (e.g., energy consumption), decide when to offload UE's applications computing tasks to the MEC server. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated via testbed experiments featuring a face recognition application.