Dependency-Aware Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising computing paradigm and can effectively reduce the energy consumption and computing costs at mobile devices by offloading computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications/tasks to edge servers. However, how to achieve cost-effective dependent task offloading and resource allocation subject to application completion time constraint and service configuration constraint at edge side in heterogeneous MEC environments remains a challenge. To address this challenge, in this paper, we study the multi-application dependent task offloading and resource allocation problem in heterogeneous MEC environments for jointly minimizing the energy consumption and computing cost. We first formulate this problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. We propose a two-stage alternating optimization algorithm. In the first stage, a genetic-based algorithm is proposed to determine an optimized task offloading profile for given transmit power matrix, a look ahead based task scheduling algorithm is designed to obtain an optimized task schedule for the profile. In the second stage, the transmit power allocation problem for a given offloading profile is solved using convex optimization techniques. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the total cost of task executions as compared with baseline algorithms.