Spatiotemporal Non-Uniformity-Aware Online Task Scheduling in Collaborative Edge Computing for Industrial Internet of Things

Mobile edge computing mitigates the shortcomings of cloud computing caused by unpredictable wide-area network latency and serves as a critical enabling technology for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Unlike cloud computing, mobile edge networks offer limited and distributed computing resources. As a result, collaborative edge computing emerges as a promising technology that enhances edge networks’ service capabilities by integrating computational resources across edge nodes. This paper investigates the task scheduling problem in collaborative edge computing for IIoT, aiming to optimize task processing performance under long-term cost constraints. We propose an online task scheduling algorithm to cope with the spatiotemporal non-uniformity of user request distribution in distributed edge networks. For the spatial non-uniformity of user requests across different factories, we introduce a graph model to guide optimal task scheduling decisions. For the time-varying nature of user request distribution and long-term cost constraints, we apply Lyapunov optimization to decompose the long-term optimization problem into a series of real-time subproblems that do not require prior knowledge of future system states. Given the NP-hard nature of the subproblems, we design a heuristic-based hierarchical optimization approach incorporating enhanced discrete particle swarm and harmonic search algorithms. Finally, an imitation learning-based approach is devised to further accelerate the algorithm's operation, building upon the initial two algorithms. Comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.