AoI-Oriented Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation for End-Edge-Cloud Computing Systems

As smart mobile applications increasingly demand timely situational awareness and energy efficiency, the Age of Information (AoI) metric plays a vital role in maintaining data freshness. This need is further supported by the end–edge–cloud computing (EECC) paradigm, which enhances application performance by facilitating task offloading to the edge or the cloud. However, existing AoI optimization solutions focus solely on task offloading, often neglecting critical aspects, such as system resource allocation and energy efficiency, which can lead to resource waste, increased energy consumption, compromised Quality of Service (QoS), and system performance degradation. Therefore, this article investigates the joint optimization of task offloading, communication and computing resource allocation in EECC systems, aiming to minimize AoI and energy consumption under constraints of deadlines and capacity constraints. To address this problem, we divide the decision space into multiple nonintersecting decision areas based on the characteristics of the studied problem and design a task offloading and resource allocation algorithm based on slow-movement particle swarm optimization (SPSO) to handle each decision area individually. In the algorithm design, we customize the position, velocity, update rules, and fitness function for the optimization problem. Finally, extensive simulation-based and testbed experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can save up to 14.56% of energy consumption, shorten AoI by up to 27.80%, and improve utility (weighted sum of AoI and energy consumption) by up to 15.89% compared with existing algorithms.