Mobility-Aware Computation Offloading for Hierarchical Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology that aims to reduce the total latency of user equipment (UE) by deploying computation resources at the edge of mobile networks. UE mobility is a challenging factor that causes the traditional MEC architecture to suffer from several issues, such as decreased efficiency and frequent service interruptions. One popular method to manage UE mobility is virtual machine (VM) migration, which requires high bandwidth and causes undesirable latency, rendering it impractical for real-time tasks with stringent latency requirements. This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture for MEC networks that facilitates mobility management and mitigates the need for VM migration. In order to utilize this architecture efficiently, a Markov chain-based predictive strategy is introduced to predict UE mobility. Afterward, an optimization problem is formulated to make the optimal long-term offloading decisions for UEs such that their expected cost is minimized subject to latency commitments and resource consumption constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme reduces the cost of high-mobility UEs by up to 25% compared to traditional schemes. Furthermore, the measures of movement direction predictability and offloading decision popularity are introduced that provide insights into the behavior of the proposed and counterpart schemes.