CoEdge: A Collaborative Architecture for Efficient Task Offloading Among Multiple Edge Service Providers

Edge computing is an emerging paradigm poised to process a substantial portion of latency-sensitive and computation-intensive tasks through edge service providers (ESPs). However, these ESPs typically operate independently and locally to serve their registered users. When processing burst tasks, the ESPs have to either scale up their respective capacities by introducing additional hardware or compromise user experience by rejecting some user requests, leading to high commercial investment or service degradation. Inspired by the promise of the win-win situation for ESPs and users, we envision a novel task offloading strategy that realizes the following rationales simultaneously: 1) collaborative service; 2) rapid response; and 3) sustainable profitability, while the existing methods fail to achieve them at one shot. To this end, we report CoEdge, a collaborative architecture for efficient task offloading among multiple ESPs in the edge network, aiming at simultaneously minimizing service delay for users and enhancing service profit for ESPs. To achieve this, CoEdge employs a central optimizer to implement a two-stage strategy that determines the task scheduling and service pricing hierarchically. We then formulate these problems and prove their NP-hardness. Additionally, we also propose efficient approximate algorithms to accommodate large-scale computing scenarios with low complexity. Experimental results using real-world datasets demonstrate that our CoEdge can significantly reduce service delay by $2.87\times $ – $4.15\times $ for users and considerably increase service profit by 32% for ESPs.