Multilevel and Energy-Efficient Partial Computation Offloading in Heterogeneous Edge Intelligence

Due to the diversity of edge devices (EDs) and applications, edge systems are heterogeneous and have been applied in artificial intelligence fields, such as smart factories and intelligent transportation, which is called heterogeneous edge intelligence. Many studies employ computation offloading to transfer processing data from resource-scarce EDs to resource-rich edge servers. These studies primarily focus on the overall resource consumption of homogeneous edge systems, neglecting the system heterogeneity and the details of resource consumption. In this article, we construct a system model from a parallel perspective for the heterogeneous edge system with different processors, memory, and applications, which perceives the cost of energy and delay from three levels: system, application, and component. A hybrid metaheuristic algorithm combined with a greedy rule, hybrid mutation, and whale optimization algorithm (GHMWOA) is proposed to realize partial computation offloading. A partial offloading architecture of heterogeneous edge intelligence is proposed to validate our model and algorithm with real-world hardware and software. Experiment results not only show GHMWOA outperforms multiple classical optimization algorithms in minimizing energy consumption, but also discover on which system component energy consumption depends, and how properties of application and system influence the cost of energy.